Film review: '8 1/2 Women'
CANNES - Unzipped to baffled critics in the final hours of the official competition, Peter Greenaway's first film since the singular "Pillow Book" was pegged by some weary Cannes chroniclers as "unwatchable," but the filmmaker is not easily dismissed, and there are stylistic and thematic concerns to ponder.
But unless one cares to watch veteran British actor John Standing ("Mrs. Dalloway") and Matthew Delamere ("Shadowlands") as clothing-optional father and son business tycoons - who look at and talk a lot about their penises and feelings before rounding up nine females for an unarousing hour of sexual experimentation - "8 1/2 Women" is impenetrable art cinema with no special flourish or logical payoff.
In fact, for a film about sex, "Women" has little of it. In a film that celebrates the sexual fantasies of men everywhere, with archetypal female roles and the cast to pull them off, Greenaway's visual style is crude and predictable. Overall, the film has a patched-together feeling after an intriguing credit sequence.
Based in Geneva, Switzerland, but recently taking over several gambling parlors in Kyoto, Japan, Philip Emmenthal (Standing) is still enjoying the unexpected surprises of life but is devastated when his wife dies. His son, Storey (Delamere), is in charge of the family's Japanese interests and has an elaborate solution to his whiny father's loneliness.
Storey and Philip watch Fellini's "8 1/2" and have visions of their own harem. Their subsequent escapades are less a fascinatingly frank adventure of male sexuality as an unwieldy blunder that has mere flashes of the Greenaway magic. The film burdens the viewer with too many characters, but provides too few pleasures to go with the endless banter of father and son.
Led by Vivian Wu as a masculine kind of girl and Polly Walker as a top-of-the-line prostitute reserved for the father but lusted after by the son, the women include an injured horsewoman (Amanda Plummer), a bald nun (Toni Collette), a lusty pachinko addict (Shizuka Inoh), an obsessed Kabuki performer (Kirina Mano) and so on.
One of the "8 " has a large pig for a pet, and poor Plummer is in bandages for most of the movie - some of the offbeat imagery and certain evocative sequences click - but the pacing is deadly uneven and there's a glaring lack of architecture, despite section titles shown over reproductions of script pages in several instances.
8 1/2 WOMEN
Woodline Prods., Movie Masters,
Delux Productions, Continent Films
A Kees Kasander production
Writer-director: Peter Greenaway
Producer: Kees Kasander
Executive producers: Terry Glinwood, Bob Hubar, Denis Wigman
Director of photography: Sacha Vierny
Production designers: Wilbert Van Dorp, Emi Wada
Editor: Elmer Leupen
Costume designer: Emi Wada
Color/stereo
Cast:
Philip Emmenthal: John Standing
Storey Emmenthal: Matthew Delamere
Kito: Vivian Wu
Simato: Shizuka Inoh
Clothilde: Barbara Sarafian
Mio: Kirina Mano
Griselda: Toni Collette
Beryl: Amanda Plummer
Giaconda: Natacha Amal
Giulietta/Half Woman: Manna Fujiwara
Palmira: Polly Walker
Running time - 120 minutes
No MPAA rating...
But unless one cares to watch veteran British actor John Standing ("Mrs. Dalloway") and Matthew Delamere ("Shadowlands") as clothing-optional father and son business tycoons - who look at and talk a lot about their penises and feelings before rounding up nine females for an unarousing hour of sexual experimentation - "8 1/2 Women" is impenetrable art cinema with no special flourish or logical payoff.
In fact, for a film about sex, "Women" has little of it. In a film that celebrates the sexual fantasies of men everywhere, with archetypal female roles and the cast to pull them off, Greenaway's visual style is crude and predictable. Overall, the film has a patched-together feeling after an intriguing credit sequence.
Based in Geneva, Switzerland, but recently taking over several gambling parlors in Kyoto, Japan, Philip Emmenthal (Standing) is still enjoying the unexpected surprises of life but is devastated when his wife dies. His son, Storey (Delamere), is in charge of the family's Japanese interests and has an elaborate solution to his whiny father's loneliness.
Storey and Philip watch Fellini's "8 1/2" and have visions of their own harem. Their subsequent escapades are less a fascinatingly frank adventure of male sexuality as an unwieldy blunder that has mere flashes of the Greenaway magic. The film burdens the viewer with too many characters, but provides too few pleasures to go with the endless banter of father and son.
Led by Vivian Wu as a masculine kind of girl and Polly Walker as a top-of-the-line prostitute reserved for the father but lusted after by the son, the women include an injured horsewoman (Amanda Plummer), a bald nun (Toni Collette), a lusty pachinko addict (Shizuka Inoh), an obsessed Kabuki performer (Kirina Mano) and so on.
One of the "8 " has a large pig for a pet, and poor Plummer is in bandages for most of the movie - some of the offbeat imagery and certain evocative sequences click - but the pacing is deadly uneven and there's a glaring lack of architecture, despite section titles shown over reproductions of script pages in several instances.
8 1/2 WOMEN
Woodline Prods., Movie Masters,
Delux Productions, Continent Films
A Kees Kasander production
Writer-director: Peter Greenaway
Producer: Kees Kasander
Executive producers: Terry Glinwood, Bob Hubar, Denis Wigman
Director of photography: Sacha Vierny
Production designers: Wilbert Van Dorp, Emi Wada
Editor: Elmer Leupen
Costume designer: Emi Wada
Color/stereo
Cast:
Philip Emmenthal: John Standing
Storey Emmenthal: Matthew Delamere
Kito: Vivian Wu
Simato: Shizuka Inoh
Clothilde: Barbara Sarafian
Mio: Kirina Mano
Griselda: Toni Collette
Beryl: Amanda Plummer
Giaconda: Natacha Amal
Giulietta/Half Woman: Manna Fujiwara
Palmira: Polly Walker
Running time - 120 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 5/28/1999
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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