THE BABY OF MACON
A film review by Gareth Rees
Copyright 1994 Gareth Rees
Director: Peter Greenaway Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Julia Ormond, Philip Stone, Jonathan Lacey Camera: Sacha Vierny Music: Matthew Locke, John Blow Editor: Chris Wyatt Producer: Kasander Kees UK/France/Belgium/Germany 1993
When Greenaway came to introduce the film at the 1993 Cambridge Film Festival, he explained that he was no longer interested in making films in a naturalistic style, or in ideas such as "character" and "plot." As far as he is concerned, there are plenty of other film-makers making films in these ways, and he wanted to set out to make films that are different, that he would want to watch, films that do for naturalism in cinema what the abstract movement did for naturalism in art.
The result is something that is difficult to identify with because the characters are flat and the dialogue is completely unconvincing (in much the way that the dialogue of a verse drama is unconvincing). I found the result utterly compelling, but very distasteful.
The business of the film is a play called "The Baby of Macon," that is being presented to a group of Renaissance nobles in the Cathedral at Macon in France. The play is introduced by the figure of Famine sitting on a swing describing how the land around Macon has been beset by famine and pestilence; crops will not grow, everything decays, when women give birth at all they give birth to monsters. One particularly ugly woman, horrendously distended, is about to give birth. We see one of the actors running up with a doll to represent the baby, but before he can supply it to the midwives, a real baby is born. It seems that on this evening the play is to happen for real. The miraculous baby becomes a source of contention between the Church, represented by the bishop's son (Ralph Fiennes) and the baby's sister (Julian Ormond), who later pretends that she is its mother. Both sides exploit the baby for their own ends, their own riches, and their own power. The play ends in tragedy and bloodbath.
One of Greenaway's aims in THE BABY OF MACON is to say something about the relationship between a film and its audience. He said that one of the sources of inspiration for the films was the banning of the Benetton advertising poster campaign in the UK that featured pictures of a newborn baby, covered in blood and still attached to its umbilical cord. An outcry caused the posters to be removed. What is so horrible about a newborn baby, Greenaway wanted to know. Why is that image (one that is seen many times a day in hospitals all over the country) so unacceptable, when much more horrific images are presented on television and the cinema, featuring murder and rape, but glamourised and made safe. Greenaway set out to make a film featuring murder and rape in which nothing was glamourised and nothing was safe.
The centerpiece of the film (I am not spoiling very much here; one of the characters in the film explains beforehand what the scene is going to involve and how long it will last) is a ten-minute long rape scene, filmed in a single virtuoso take. There's no edit to make it safe for us, no looking away; we can't say so easily and so quickly "it was all illusion" (although of course it is). The play-within-a-film construction of THE BABY OF MACON allows this scene to become a representation of a snuff film: the actress "steps out of character" to express relief that it's only a play, only to discover that this night it is "for real." This step out of the fiction is disconcerting and horrifying; a number of people walked out of the cinema at this point on both the occasions that I've watched the film (though not as many as walked out of THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER - perhaps cinema-goers had received more warning of the kind of images they were likely to be confronted with in this case).
At the end of the film, the camera pulls back through the theatre (actually the cathedral at Macon) and the cast bow toward the camera to the sound of rapturous applause. Clearly it is the audience in the cinema to whom the applause is attributed, and the effect is to make the audience feel that it is complicit in its approval of what it has seen on the screen. I felt that however much I admired Greenaway's film-making skill, I did not want to applaud the action, and yet the framing of the end of the film made me complicit in the action, implying that because I had chosen to attend the film, I had some part in causing it to be made. The feeling was uncomfortable and thought-provoking.
Other ideas in THE BABY OF MACON are treated in less detail: the exploitation of children; the oppression of women by the medieval Church; the relationship between science and superstition during the Renaissance; the Catholic fascination with the Madonna and Child.
If you expect a conventional film in which you can identify with one or more of the leading characters and enjoy and entertaining plot, then you are sure to be annoyed and disappointed. If you're prepared for a film that's quite different from Greenaway's previous feature films (though anticipated by the "TV Dante" and "M is for Man, Music and Mozart") then you might be impressed.
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