8 1/2 Women
When I met Peter Greenaway, I found that I could better appreciate his movies. He is not a cheerful man; he is mental, disciplined and talks as if he were dictating. “He speaks like a university professor,” I noted after our encounter in 1991, “and appears to prefer dining alone to enduring bores at his table.” However there is also an assertive almost fierce sense of humor about him; one can picture him pulling practical jokes like Hitchcock.
Take a scene from his new movie “8 1/2 Women.” It happens in a respectable Swiss cemetery. The main character Philip Emmenthal (John Standing) is a billionaire who has just lost his wife. He shows up at the funeral dressed in a white summer suit because she did not like dark clothes. He is told that according to the bylaws this requires black.
Furious, rebellious, obstinate, he doggedly peels off layers until he stands naked on the gravel; following the letter of the law, he insists upon black underwear too. Around him are underlings who offer their garments a black shirt, tie, pants, coat even underwear (“it looks like a swimming costume,” its owner says, “and I was hoping to go swimming later”). His choice forces his staff members to undress as well and now clothed in black he walks few feet over and we see what we couldn’t see before: nearby stood the minister and all the mourners everything was visible all along.
How does this work as comedy? Trying to think how other types might handle it I put it through Monty Python, Steve Martin, Woody Allen finally realizing it’s rooted in Buster Keaton whose favorite comic device was overcoming obstacles by applying pure logic while ignoring social conventions or taboos. Keaton would have leaned toward laughs more certainly; Greenaway’s comedy always seems bleak and covers (not very well) a lot of hostility. But yes Keaton.
An approach to “8 1/2 Women,” I think, is as a slowed down, affected, tongue in cheek silent comedy infected by Greenaway’s resentment and need to control. The title of the movie brings back memories of how Greenaway numbers, classifies, sorts and arranges the characters in his other movies. Titles like “Drowning by Numbers” and “A Zed and Two Noughts” show the same feeling; he distances himself from their humanity by treating them as stock.
But here real emotion gets onto the screen by force. Philip is genuinely grieving for his wife who died (“Who will hold me close now that she’s gone?”) and his despair affects Storey (Matthew Delamere). There is an off screen but unmistakably suggested scene where they have incestuous sex maybe as mutual consolation many scenes where Greenaway so interested in male nudity has them standing before mirrors naked with each other this is not sexual but revelatory nudity; a naked billionaire (and Rolls Royces chateaus servants) just another way of saying naked man with flat feet belly.
In Kyoto, Japan, a father and his son have been planning to acquire a number of pachinko parlors. Pachinko is a highly addictive form of pinball that is greatly loved in Japan. They meet a woman who has gambled away most of her family’s savings and they are shocked when her dad and boyfriend suggest she sleeps with Storey (or Philip) as payment for the debt. (The Emmenthals aren’t Japanese therefore this doesn’t represent any loss of honor, according to the translator).
This woman becomes one of eight and half women moved into their Geneva mansion by the father and son as an effort to bury their grief under sexual pleasures. All these women participate willingly the one in a strange body brace, the one who is never happy except when pregnant, an amputee who counts as only half. Greenaway never shoots or constructs any sex scene from this movie in revelatory or erotic ways; always power, manipulation, control.
The movie is cold except when the father grieves really and distant. Its bones show through its skin: some shots are superimposed on pages of script that describe them. One does not “like” this film, but admires it, wonders at it.
Greenaway does not much need to be liked (I suspect), and what he is doing here has links with his deepest feelings which he discloses only indirectly. Twice during the film father & son watch Fellini’s “8 1/2,” especially where hero gathers all women in his life into same room and tries to tame & placate them. After second viewing father asks son: “How many film directors make films to satisfy their sexual fantasies?” “Most of them,” says son. This one certainly does not disappoint in that regard!
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