film Home > Movie Reviews

There's something about Peter Greenaway's painterly sensibility, fastidious attention to detail, and drollness that makes you want to like his work, but somehow he seems to be dead set against allowing such thing. In what should be his most accessible film, 81/2 Women--a nodding homage to Federico Fellini and an absurdist fantasy packed with colorful extremes--Greenaway's art is hobbled by the filmmaker's off-putting distance and an almost willful determination to remain oblique, apparently just for its own sake. Instead of a diversion, 81/2 Women becomes one long annoyance.

Philip Emmenthal (John Standing) is a wealthy businessman bouncing between Kyoto and Geneva whose purchase of a gambling club sets in motion a dangerous new way of living. Ostensibly crushed by the mirror of mortality his wife's death has held before him, Philip turns to his selfish but imaginative son, Storey (Matthew Delamere), for comfort, and he gets it--in the form of a challenge to indulge in all things sexual. And so Philip does.

A screening of the film 81/2, Fellini's tribute to women and the fantasies they inspire, prompts father and son to turn Philip's Geneva estate into a pleasure dome stocked with every kind of female fancy: the gold digger, the virginal nun, the Asian enigma, the perverted dominatrix, the repressed sapphist, the backstairs maid, the fertile baby-maker, the ultimate whore. Each gets assigned a room in the estate and Philip spreads himself among them, with Storey trudging through the leftovers.

Greenaway provides striking scenes with careful lighting and mesmerizing color schemes that recall any number of serious paintings, but all the beauty can't cover up the thinness of the jocularity and, more seriously, the strain of misogyny running through the tale. (This isn't the first time Greenaway's work has reflected this attitude.) For all the director's steadfast denials of an anti-feminine bias, though, 81/2 Women's portrayal of women is no tribute; when not flat-out objectifying them, Greenaway presents his female characters as shallow, hackneyed conventions driven by fantastic greed and the desire to dominate and crush men. Some fantasy indeed.

It's startling to see some of the glorious actresses who signed on for this bumpy ride: The Sixth Sense's Toni Collette, perfectly fine as the nun until she inspires (probably unintentional) mirth with her Norwegian accent; the fearless Amanda Plummer, who takes her delight in extremist roles to the limit with her character's gargoyle makeup and affectional preferences for a pig and a horse; and, seemingly the most comfortable in her role, Polly Walker as the ultimate pleasure machine. Walker's work here recalls some of Amanda Donohoe's most stellar turns.

In all fairness, it could be said that the men hardly fare very well here either--Philip is a repressed straight arrow making up for a lifetime of conservative behavior, and Storey is a resentful, monied geek (with a never-explained power to cause earthquakes). Still, it is the men who are calling the shots, and it is their fantasies that are being fulfilled and overturned.

So, if there's nothing illuminating here about the women or inspiring in the men, what exactly is it Greenaway is trying to tell us? One possibility is that 81/2 Women is a father-son tale about two men who labor to cover their own unsettled feelings by throwing nude women into the mix. (As Philip observes, perplexed, "There are stories about sons desiring mother, but never sons desiring fathers. Why is that?") But despite all the eye candy, 81/2 Women is hardly original, barely inspired, and more often than not simply a bore.