Harems, Taboos and Totems Clearly, there is an impression that certain directors of author's cinema, conceiving to shoot at a certain stage of their career metakino, this contemplative cast of their loved ones, consider themselves obliged to pay tribute to the great Federico Fellini and his '8 1/2' instead of drawing such an obvious context to formulate their own vision of the otherworldly world of cinema, where acting roles, masks and real faces are fused in a terrible triendinity. Postmodernism greatly simplifies life and adorns creativity, and Fellini could not do without hypertextuality, neither Godard, nor Truffaut, nor Almodovar (and don Pedro did it twice), nor Tarantino, nor even the cult British artist with algebraic skills and a little more director Peter Greenway, in 1999, when his career began to plan a certain decline, cosplaying the famous Italian hardly more expressive and incomprehensible than all in his “Eight and a half women”.
The deliberately filled with irony story of Emmentale, nouveau riche Philip and his son Story is read too literally, despite all the efforts of the director himself and his two cameramen - Van Brummelen and Vierney - to saturate literally every frame with exquisite aesthetics and implicit metaphor. But the plot, built in the spirit of the Canterbury stories of Chaucer, gradually breaks down only into a heap of episodes of erotic, psychoerotic or near-erotic orientation. Moreover, it is obvious that under the images of Philip and Storey (a too-speaking name; a kind of embodied narrative), Greenaway implies himself, and the whole picture from beginning to end - unusually ascetic, devoid of the usual courtly baroque slovenliness - is a sublimation of author's self-exploration, to a certain extent his painful reflection, a careful desire to disassemble himself into pieces in front of everyone, undressed in film language. The echoes of the director’s previous films – from “Falls” to “Intimate Diary” and “Z00” – are visible to the naked eye, but in essence there is neither a wealth of colors nor a feast of textures in this picture. Cleansed of the aesthetic hyperformalism of Greenaway, in Eight and a Half Women, he gave a dry residue, a squeeze of his creativity exclusively from the point of view of philosophy and habitual physiological physicality.
His “Eight and a Half Women” is at the same time an attempt to understand the male nature through the prism of looking at the father and son of Emmentals, who after the death of a woman who kept them in a certain moral bridle – mother and wife – went into total discontent, turning their luxurious castle in Geneva into a real garden of earthly pleasures, savoring a multinational harem with women of all types and characters: from the silent disabled woman who is the notorious “half” to the sexually liberated nun. As if seeking to reject any further claims of death, Philip and his son Storey will indulge in the shameless depravity of life, not realizing that death is inevitable for them, and homosexual incest is simply homosexual incest, not an attempt to free themselves from their own spiritual bonds. The cradle on this side of the understanding of the tape is already rocking not Signor Federico, but Herr Sigmund with his Totem and Taboo, as well as other terry works on the knowledge of human psychology. Orgasm as a small death here appears exactly as a natural death, and the sexual adventures of two men look all the more tragicomic that they cannot cope with the woman’s kingdom they themselves created. The ladies have grasped their plans and are holding their members firmly by their guns. A fatal trap that condemns these two men, unable to deal with themselves, to an inevitably absurdistic existence. Coupled with the notorious degeneration of the entire aristocracy, on which Greenaway always looked with undisguised contempt. But this time he was replaced by boredom and the unspeakable power of longing, which the director himself will be able to truly get rid of only in his six-hour Suitcases of Tulse Luper.