Eight and a Half Women (1999)
Country: NL/GB/LUX/GER
Technical: col 121m
Director: Peter Greenaway
Cast: John Standing, Matthew Delamere, Vivian Wu
Synopsis:
A businessman with strong Japanese interests living in Geneva is widowed, grieves helplessly for a while, and then regenerates his sex life by building up a harem in his country house with the aid of his son.
Review:
Contracts of a sexual nature, orientalism, death by drowning, deformity, an interest in animals...so many of the director's penchants are revisited here that it seems almost a compendium of his work, rather like the classic it invokes with its title. (It is in fact his ninth film, unless you consider Prospero's Books only half a film since he didn't write it!) But it also draws inspiration from Godard and, intentionally or not, Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe), raising the question, explicitly and implicitly, of whether people make films to satisfy their sexual fantasies, and mirroring Godard's formal deconstruction of cinema in its 'breaking-up' of the bordello. It marks a departure in its grammar: far more close-ups than before, though still a very static camera and, for all the sexual content, no representation of the act itself whatever.
Country: NL/GB/LUX/GER
Technical: col 121m
Director: Peter Greenaway
Cast: John Standing, Matthew Delamere, Vivian Wu
Synopsis:
A businessman with strong Japanese interests living in Geneva is widowed, grieves helplessly for a while, and then regenerates his sex life by building up a harem in his country house with the aid of his son.
Review:
Contracts of a sexual nature, orientalism, death by drowning, deformity, an interest in animals...so many of the director's penchants are revisited here that it seems almost a compendium of his work, rather like the classic it invokes with its title. (It is in fact his ninth film, unless you consider Prospero's Books only half a film since he didn't write it!) But it also draws inspiration from Godard and, intentionally or not, Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe), raising the question, explicitly and implicitly, of whether people make films to satisfy their sexual fantasies, and mirroring Godard's formal deconstruction of cinema in its 'breaking-up' of the bordello. It marks a departure in its grammar: far more close-ups than before, though still a very static camera and, for all the sexual content, no representation of the act itself whatever.
Country: NL/GB/LUX/GER
Technical: col 121m
Director: Peter Greenaway
Cast: John Standing, Matthew Delamere, Vivian Wu
Synopsis:
A businessman with strong Japanese interests living in Geneva is widowed, grieves helplessly for a while, and then regenerates his sex life by building up a harem in his country house with the aid of his son.
Review:
Contracts of a sexual nature, orientalism, death by drowning, deformity, an interest in animals...so many of the director's penchants are revisited here that it seems almost a compendium of his work, rather like the classic it invokes with its title. (It is in fact his ninth film, unless you consider Prospero's Books only half a film since he didn't write it!) But it also draws inspiration from Godard and, intentionally or not, Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe), raising the question, explicitly and implicitly, of whether people make films to satisfy their sexual fantasies, and mirroring Godard's formal deconstruction of cinema in its 'breaking-up' of the bordello. It marks a departure in its grammar: far more close-ups than before, though still a very static camera and, for all the sexual content, no representation of the act itself whatever.