THE BABY OF MACON A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 2000 David N. Butterworth
***1/2 (out of ****)
No other filmmaker, living or dead, could have made "The Baby of Mācon." And no other filmmaker would have wanted to.
Peter Greenaway's controversial and rarely-seen 1993 film saw a very limited run here in the United States, opening in New York and L.A. and then disappearing forever. Its content--your typical Greenaway excesses of murder, gang rape, disembowelment, dismemberment, full-frontal nudity, and more philosophical and allegorical allusions than you can shake a stick at--was judged too offensive, and the film failed to find a U.S. distributor.
That's unfortunate, because it's one of the director's best.
"The Baby of Mācon" is staged as a 17th century masque performed before a live theater audience of Medici noblemen and women. Unfolding like a spectacular Renaissance tapestry, the film makes full use of Greenaway's huge and non-traditional cinematic palette, a highly-ritualistic style that emphasizes the filmmaker's straight-laced approach to the film's unsettling themes. In "The Baby of Mācon," Greenaway employs widescreen, saturated hues (a lot of the time it looks like it was shot in red and white), extravagant costumes, baroque music (without the help of regular composer Michael Nyman, alas), and a wildly witty and literate script that is often times absurd, provocative, and downright nasty.
All the descriptions commonly associated with the director's work apply here: sumptuous, decadent, outrageous, intellectually provocative, hard-to-stomach. Greenaway's artistic assessment that the making of his films is more stimulating than the watching of them will be supported by those looking for traditional elements of plot and character, but fans of this unique talent will find much to appreciate in "The Baby of Mācon," even though the film is definitely not one for the squeamish.
In a world riddled by plague, pestilence, and female sterility, a beautiful baby is miraculously born to a grotesque old woman. The baby's sister (Julia Ormond) claims the child as her own, proclaiming a virgin birth. Ralph Fiennes as The Bishop's Son is plainly skeptical that the child is the new Messiah and takes it upon himself to disprove the blasphemous contention. As one might predict from both the subject matter and the director of the piece, "events build to a shocking and brutal climax."
With "The Baby of Mācon," Peter Greenaway once again proves that he is unlike any other filmmaker and that makes this film--and his eclectic body of work in general--well worth seeing. Unfortunately, after just one week, Greenaway's latest opus (the less-satisfying "8 1/2 Women") has already been and gone.
Oh well. There's always "Mission: Impossible 2," I suppose.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@dca.net
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