Men behaving badly

>> Greenaway tanks with 8 1/2 Women

by MATTHEW HAYS

It's difficult to know exactly when experimental filmmaker Peter Greenaway began to seriously suck. Was it in 1991, when he released Prospero's Books, his confusing take on The Tempest? Or was it during the release of his obnoxiously pretentious '95 entry, The Pillow Book?

Such speculation will depend on your taste--some would argue he's still a fascinating director though frankly, I've never been a diehard fan. But one thing's for sure: 8 1/2 Women isn't going to go down in the history books as his comeback movie.

The film begins with promise, something I wasn't expecting considering the negative attitude I understandably walked into the movie with (it was savaged at Cannes when it premiered last year). An elderly woman dies in bed. Her husband (John Standing), a wealthy Brit, phones his son (Matthew Delamere) in Japan to tell him, informing him of his dire emotional stress after such a loss. Son flies home to be with pops and the two wax philosophical about mortality, intimacy and why sonny boy has never gotten hitched.

This is a simplistic summary; of course, nothing is ever so straightforward in a Greenaway film. There's plenty of bizarre imagery, unsettlingly juxtaposed with other bizarre imagery. Pops screams in the bathtub, while two Sumo wrestlers square off on TV, caught in the hues of video blues; pops sticks a drill to his head; a Geisha girl dances in front of a pig; and so on.

The film soon moves onto their search for a fitting woman, which in turn leads them to turn their rather posh mansion into a whorehouse, where they have various women to choose from. Feminist critics have rather predictably taken Greenaway to task for the representations of women in this film, but I fear they've simply risen to Greenaway's bait. This is clearly a self-consciously sexist film, with its narcissistic male father-and-son leads never presented as anything to laud. Besides, this line of criticism raises the question: how can we possibly hold the surreal to pc standards?

As 8 1/2 Women descends into the internal politics of the men and their harem, it soon also descends into the irritatingly repetitive. There's beautiful cinematography and some intriguing internal tension created by the skewering of the British stiff upper lip by a director so anally fixated with detail. But 8 1/2 Women, despite these occasional bits of flair, soon becomes another indication of a director who's gone astray.

8 1/2 Women opens Friday, March 17 at the Ex-Centris. See repertory listings for showtimes