Behind Peter Greenaway's latest film, 8½ Women, lie two connected ideas about the cities of Kyoto and Geneva. In Kyoto, Japanese women make themselves repeatedly susceptible to sexual blackmail by their Pachinko
parlour gambling habits and, at the collapse of the Berlin Wall Geneva,
for a time, became the prostitution capital for women who wanted quick
access to the West with a valid, few-questions-asked passport.
When Geneva-based businessman Philip Emmenthal (John Standing) inherits
some Japanese Pachinko parlours to add to his already significant wealth,
his son Storey (Matthew Delamere) offers to manage them. In the process of
looking after these gambling houses which can be found on every Japanese
high street, he enthusiastically throws himself into Japanese culture.
Following the death of his mother, Storey tries to deflect his father's
grief for one woman by enthusing him of the archetype "Woman." And so,
father and son convert their large Geneva family house into their own
private bordello, filling it with women they rescue from Pachinko parlour
gambling debts and other situations of shady finance around Europe.
Thus, in 8½ Women, we find ourselves in familiar Greenaway territory. Above all, the director remains attracted to lists and taxonomy systems and the function they can perform of stripping things and events down to their absolute basics of organisation. Greenaway has described himself as
a clerk and a cataloguer who simply makes movies about lists. But his
point is also that the world cannot be comprehensively incorporated into
any set of lists.
This time, as the title suggests, Greenaway's list attempts to deal with
the portrayal of female sexuality. But despite allusions to both Fellini and
Godard, 8½ Women distinctly fails in commenting on how cinema has portrayed women as sex objects. His list of archetypes here - nun,
cross-dresser, whore with a heart of gold etc - remain just that. Lacking
in any subtle nuances of emotional development, these cariacatures simply
fail to become women, leaving us with a film about two male protagonists and
their fantasies. Greenaway also fails in his attempt to produce a black
comedy. Clever, but not funny, 8½ Women fails to hit the spot on all levels.
Reviewed by Jovan Ilic
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