CARLOS SAURA'S The Garden of Delights is a cultural parable, and like most such parables, its narrative surface verges on the inane:

Antonio Coco, a wealthy Spanish industrialist, is in a car accident that leaves him paralvzed and amnesiac. While he sits immobile in a wheelchair, prey to guilt-ridden hallucinations, his estate and manufacturing company fall into hopeless disarray. Decisions are left unmade, allowances stop, family discipline falls apart and, worse, a Swiss bank account number is lost. The process of the film becomes an attempt on the part of his family, mistress, and attendants, to shock Antonio back into health by acting out various psychological traumas of his past (a punishment in which he is locked in his room with a pig, a confirmation service disrupted by revolutionaries, a platitude-laden speech before dissatisfied workers). Treated as a child. Antonio responds as a child, and throughout, he is a passive on-looker to his own history.

This is the stuff that makes bad melodrama, and Saura knows it and is indifferent to it- because he cares nothing for his plot. Given the story situation, he could have made the film into a psychological study, a detective story, or a lover's confrontation. But his aim is merely to tease the possibilities of all three, just enough to provide a context for his real interest which is to create a parable of the decay of capitalist consciousness. The hallucinating mind of Antonio comes to represent a political system deprived of coherence, left only to a bombast of images of its growth, crimes, guilts and fears. The plot is a contrivance to make feasible the various fantasies and surreal dramas that provide the core of Saura's parable, far more important than the narrative surface.

Given the political nature of the subject, the temptation is toward a hopelessly academic treatment, but Saura, for the most part, avoids high-minded moralist (though there is in particular one strained metaphor of a paralyzed right hand for right-wing ideology). Like Bosch's fifteenth century painting from which Saura takes his title, the film tries to step inside the allegory it sets up and give itself to a wide-eyed fascination with the workings of vice. Saura has learned from Bunuel, whom he openly imitates at times, how to use sensual indulgences to make an intellectual point. His method is to instruct by allowing participation- in a drowning fantasy, a hunting sequence, or in the grotesque rituals of over-acted sexuality.

The movement of the film depends on the reflexive nature of Antonio's situation. He is at once the original perpetrator of all the confusion acted out on screen and at the same time a passive halfwit naively fearful of that confusion. Amnesiac Antonio has no desire to assume once again the position of capitalist tycoon Antonio. And this duality allows Saura a means of criticism from the inside out.

There is, for instance, one hallucination in which two squads of children advance toward one another behind red and yellow shields, throwing what appear to be rubber balls. There is no sound, only a slow camera movement inward until several children are revealed lying dead and bloodied on the ground. Then abruptly and without comment, the scene cuts to Antonio staring blankly into space. At another point, Antonio wanders into his son's room, asking the way out of the house. On the wall are Paul McCartney and Easy Rider posters; next to the bed is a record player. The son, thus stereotyped, immediately assumes the role of the father, berating the other for lack of responsibility, respect and so on. The scene ends with Antonio thrown violently out of the room.

Had they been treated from a detached critical point of view, both these scenes would have been embarrassing exercises in heavy-handed social commentary. But seen through Antonio's eyes, even the most obvious political points are somehow ingenuous and therefore palatable. His witless incomprehension makes him a hero by default. All the characters are mere sticks, but Antonio is an appealing stick. In a world of universally despicable characters passivity becomes a positive virtue.

SAURA defines his politics by opposition, and Antonio's resistance to his own recovery is the kind of interior revulsion against capitalism that Saura wants most of all to present. Perhaps the best example of this comes toward the end of the film when Antonio has recovered sufficiently to walk and mumble vague desires. He asks to be taken out in a boat. His wife, thinking it a moment of nostalgia for their honeymoon, joyfully rows him out from shore. But once on the lake, Antonio begins rocking the boat spasmodically, pathetically slapping at his wife with an oar, muttering all the while, "An American tragedy, An American tragedy." There is more here than a comic allusion to Dreiser's novel. Saura has finally defined the object of his attacks, for The Garden of Delights is indeed an American tragedy, the tragedy of a stagnating political consciousness confronted with grotesque images of its past.

What sustains the film is the aptness of individual scenes such as this one, where Saura touches the bitterly comic within the pathetic. But capitalist consciousness as a subject can fascinate for only so long. And there are moments when Saura seems to be groping for one more element to satirize, one more fantasy to present.

Finally, he is unsure how to end his film and lets it drift off in surrealism. Though his contempt for capitalism is apparent, Saura is unwilling to commit himself to a concrete alternative. He scores point after political point, but he stops his argument short of its finish. The film is a proof without a conclusion. And the problem is not in Saura's treatment but implicit in the subject itself. Capitalism is a system that yet awaits its formal conclusion, and while Saura marks time until the fall, he can only offer a pessimism cloaked in satire. As it is the force of his attacks succeeds but success here brings not a clarifying but a confusing of emotions- like a good portrait of an ugly man.