8 ½ Women (1999)

 

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: John Standing as Philip Emmenthal; Matthew Delamere as Storey Emmenthal; Vivian Wu as Kito; Annie Shizuka Inoh as Simato; Barbara Sarafian as Clothilde; Kirina Mano as Mio; Toni Collette as Griselda; Amanda Plummer as Beryl; Natacha Amal as Giaconda; Manna Fujiwara as Giulietta the Half Woman; Polly Walker as Palmira; Elizabeth Berrington as Celeste, Emmenthal Maid; Myriam Muller as Marianne, Emmenthal Maid; Don Warrington as Simon; Claire Johnston as Amelia, Philip's Wife

Canon Fodder

 

That's an unrecognisable blasphemy in Japan!

A word to describe Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway? Esoteric. The former employee of the Central Office of Information (COI), Greenaway made short work on architecture and current trends in the seventies alongside progressing to experimental short films. His debut The Falls (1980), a three hour plus fake documentary set within a Britain hit by a bizarre disease that turned people half bird, pretty started off with his intentions he would carry throughout his career. An obsessive compulsive interest in lists; an insanely encyclopaedic view of art, literature and other mediums; a profane and at times controversial attitude to the body, be it equal opportunity nudity to violence which came in films that came after The Falls, and a pitch black sense of humour.

What changed over the decades is that he wrote narratives with actors soon after The Falls. This did not stop him from pushing the experimentation, to an extreme by the nineties as he would eventually fragment and multi-layer the screen (in Prospero's Books (1991)), or to discovering computer editing for The Pillow Book (1996). He also found talented individuals for behind the camera; this is after composer Michael Nyman has moved on in the early part of the decade, but 8 ½ Women is important as the last collaboration with cinematographer Sacha Vierny, famously the cinematographer of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and who Greenaway first worked with from A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) to this film. (The film is co-shot with Reinier van Brummelen, and Vierny would pass in 2001 not long after).

8 ½ Women, even as a fan, was the one Greenaway film I was hesitant to revisit as its the film, in a career of someone who pushed buttons and upset people, which has two men (banking mogul grieving over his wife's death, and his son) build a harem of eight and a half women catering to their fetished images of women. Paying for them, or even using blackmail, to have them in the elder's home, they varied between Toni Collette as a former nun to Kirina Mano from Shinya Tsukamoto's Bullet Ballet (1998) playing a woman obsessed with kabuki theatre and wishing to be more "feminine", becoming a member of the harem as a stereotypical geisha. Thankfully, even if it involves throwing Federico Fellini under the bus, the film is skewering this premise from the get-go, mocking their fetishes when this idea stems from the elder's lack of sexual experience, having watched Fellini's legendary film 8 ½ (1963) in a theatre to grieve the loss of the mother/wife figure, referring to a sequence of Marcello Mastroianni's lead having a fantasy sequence, one where the women of his life are in a harem including those who eventually become ignored and rebel back.

The question of where Greenaway is going is to prod and skewer this fantasy of his film's two leads, beginning with the question if cinema is a way for a director to create his sexual fantasies, and the stereotypes of feminine identity in male fantasy, including a debate on whether a Jane Austin heroine would be more sexually exciting then one from a Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy work. 8 ½ Women plays to the double sided coin of the harem fantasy, that a) a man even if he had one might not be able to keep up physically and mentally to the fantasy, and b) that these women are strong and independent figures who buckle the image and argue back, especially because of Palmira (Polly Walker), the only harem member who is not bribed or blackmailed into this scenario, but willingly did so for a lark. The film has aged, but not necessarily of the premise, where the women eventually turn the tables on their male dominants with ease, whether secretly planning to poison them or with Giaconda (Natacha Amal), a woman who loves having children and being pregnant, who is so fertile that it forces the men to have to contemplate children. As Palmira has become the object of obsession for the father, distract entirely by her, the sense of the film aging is more that Greenaway's caustic and corpse black sense of humour here has a couple of moments which will raise eyebrows, such as a character believing he can keep a concubine by blacking himself up like Othello or that a large part of the humour is two very privileged men, one entirely closed in, making crass remarks about the outside world.

The knife-edge Greenaway manages to walk on is that we see the humanity of our lead males in spite of some tasteless witticisms, that the harem is an inherently misguided decision but only because it stems from two men grieving the loss of a loved one, the establishing first half a lengthy part of bonding between father and son. Once the harem is created, it is entirely clear their fantasy will crumble, due to real women not being like the fantasy, some taking umbrage to their position, and even a supernatural amount of earthquakes, also involved as the son (Storey Emmenthal) evoked one is speech and has seemingly caused them to follow him around.

The female cast, far from marginalised and in various states of undress, are not props just from the fact that Greenaway was always open to having his male cast do full front nudity, both in his obsession to replicate and evoke classic art, and as a scholar of what we call the human flesh and all inside it in gristly detail. That and that he casts a surprising batch of distinct figures for the titular women. Vivian Wu, lead of The Pillow Book, returns as the accountant; it is still strange casting her as a Japanese character again, despite being Chinese, but she is good in a smaller role. Kirina Mano, who I did not realise was here, is probably most known for Bullet Ballet, standing out there, but is distinct as a character here too whose mostly speaking in the state of kabuki half sung voice. The rest of the cast is an eclectic mix, from European actresses like Barbara Sarafian, the prolific Canadian-American actress Amanda Plummer, playing a woman who liberates horses from owners and has an openly sexual relationship with a pig named Hortace, to Polly Walker, another prolific and hard working actress for cinema and television who carries a huge bulk of the film in terms of the lead female character. She is also the one who has the most scenes as an eroticised state as, whilst frank in talk, this film is more restrained in spite of its premise in terms of sexual content and even nudity for Peter Greenaway, which has an effect of the film avoiding becoming potentially crass.

It helps Greenaway, despite his claims over the years of cinema being dead and arguments that it is an inadequate medium, has always both been a distinct visual director who explored the medium, and also a distinct and good writer. He can be crude and erudite at the same time, wisely always taking a structured plot with a reliance on actors, building up on his ideas through listed or ordered themes to progress, and a lot of corpse black humour. A lot of the film, despite having aged in ways, is still funny in the modern day like contemplating the human prick as a piece of architectural brilliance, meant to be as absurd and thoughtful as that sentence sounds. In terms of his cinema, this is one of his most straightforward narratively. By this point, he had pushed the medium in some very experimental films, and would so past this through his career, but 8 ½ Women does not necessarily challenge structurally as others do. It has taken from his previous use of digital editing and layering the images from The Pillow Book, but baring touches like having images within images, showing pachinko players in scenes in the first half set in Japan, or superimposing parts of the screenplay itself over the images, he is more restrained after the radical nature of his nineties films.

From then on, this plays as a rebuttal to all the initial set up, where not long after the harem is set up it is clearly doomed to fail. The moment the two male leads acquire their goal, the soon after it starts to crumble, and we follow on with both tragedy (and even final happiness) for the characters even if through a very questionable choice of life decisions, Greenaway taking no sides even if some of the material will come off as profane or questionable for some viewers. It is in a position, unfortunate to also disappearing in time, of being a Greenaway film not talked about, which is surprising knowing films from this period and throughout his career (especially Prospero's Book) which are more divisive and more talked of which have not even gotten the basic decency of a sole DVD as 8 ½ Women at least got in the director-writer's homeland. As with all his films, this does add a great deal to find and see.