Genius at work

REVIEW

• 1/2

‘’8 1/2 Women

Directed by Peter Greenaway

Stars John Standing, Matthew Delamere

Rated R

Opens June 16

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The label “genius” is like a lawn dart. You just don’t want to throw it around casually. Sure, lots and lots of films and books and such can safely be described as ingenious, and there are any number of artists who are sporadically seized by genius, but geniuses - those are rare.

There’s a good reason for the scarcity of the species, too; for genius is never static, never really consistent. You can’t count on geniuses. They may breathe some singular spirit into everything they touch, but there is no guarantee they will produce something comprehensible or marketable or even good, which is why no one will ever hire Peter Greenaway to direct Mission: Impossible 3 or Gone in Another 60 Seconds. Whatever makes a genius a genius, he’s got it in buckets, but there is just no telling what this painter-turned-director is going to do next.

Greenaway’s filmwork is probably the most innovative, illuminating, infuriating stuff put on film since the ’60s. At his best, when he is on top of his game - in A Zed & Two Naughts or Prospero’s Books - Greenaway has made works that will doubtless remain enduring landmarks of the medium. At his worse - in, say, The Belly of an Architect or The Baby of Macon - his films are the cinematic equivalent of watching very pretty cats slide, claws first, down a densely overwritten chalkboard. And, perhaps the ultimate hallmark of his genius, you never really know which of the two categories to put one of his films until it’s well over, if then. You can’t just watch a Greenaway movie (especially since he likes to play at luring you in with loveliness and then smacking you with something you cannot bear to watch); you have to digest it.

At a guess, still chewing, 8 1/2 Women is one of those landmark works. Like all of his films, it is a complex, multi-faceted homage - to movies, to art, to literature. And like all his films, it is informed by genius and a wicked sense of humor. But 8 1/2 Women is a beautifully ordered homage, and Greenaway seems, for a change, to want us to get most of the jokes.

Owing as great a debt to Shakespeare and King Lear as to 8 1/2 and Fellini, the ghost who most explicitly haunts the film, 8 1/2 Women follows an aging tycoon (John Standing, in a revelatory performance) as he confronts loss, desire, mortality and the end of Western cultural dominance traveling in Asia and Europe with his son after the sudden death of his wife of many years. Both men, preoccupied with sex and always confusing it with control or security or love, parade their lusts and their loves, past and present, before each other in a peacock duel that is at once comical, disturbing and pathetic. At the height of youth and on the cusp of decrepitude respectively, both men are systematically stripped of the pretense and power that (inadequately) fig-leafs the insecurities and infantile passions that have driven them through their lives. The portrait we are left with is frankly shocking in its nakedness.

And naked is the right word. Peter Greenaway uses nudity as has no other director before him. He filled the frame in Prospero’s Books with so many unclad bodies that bared flesh lost all the suggestiveness with which the cinema typically imbues it, and nakedness became a purely pictorial element, an object of compositional, rather than erotic, beauty. In this film, nudity, specifically male nudity, a relatively rare thing in American movies, is a resonant sign of the fragility and ephemerality of the human condition. Greenaway’s great triumph in 8 1/2 Women is, in fact, how he manages to reveal the beauty of the bodies of the old and the infirm, the bodies forever banned from Hollywood’s fantasyland of personally trained abs and digitally enhanced body-doubles.

There is little hope that Peter Greenaway will attract much of a mass audience with 8 1/2 Women, even if it is his most user-friendly film since The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. But if you’ve never seen a genius at work, or if Greenaway alienated you in one of his downstrokes, this is definitely the best point at which to jump on (or in front of) the train. It is certainly the most rewarding of his films narratively, the most richly written and, most important, the funniest. And genius is so much less annoying when it’s funny. ??

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