THE BABY OF MACON
A film review by Michael Brooke
Copyright 1995 Michael Brooke
Written and directed by Peter Greenaway. UK/Netherlands/France/Germany, 1993, colour, 122 mins. Starring Julia Ormond, Ralph Fiennes, Jonathan Lacey.
After a pre-release screening of Peter Greenaway's THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER, the audience (mostly critics and exhibitors) were split down the middle. Some loved it, others thought he'd gone much too far and was looking at a major critical and commercial disaster ("it's Greenaway's 1941", was a phrase I recall). Well, as hindsight reveals, COOK THIEF was Greenaway's biggest hit ever, and the film that finally cemented his reputation on the other side of the Atlantic (helped no doubt by the row over its X rating), and critical opinion was, in the main, favourable.
Well, with THE BABY OF MACON, he really does go too far, and the result is one of the most gratuitously unpleasant and indefensibly nasty films of recent years. Although Greenaway has argued that the violence in THE BABY OF MACON is more than justified by the amount of allegorical interpretations that it throws up (he's even cited the current Bosnian tragedy as inspiration), the film itself doesn't stand up to such scrutiny for a moment, because of Greenaway's perverse determination to make the process of watching the film as much of an ordeal as possible, right from the stuttering plague victim who supplies the scene-setting narration. When he's not treating us to murder, multiple rape and child dismemberment, he's numbing our brains with boredom over the ritualised style that for some reason demands that the majority of the lines in the play-within-the-film are repeated three times (apparently the screenplay was originally intended as an opera libretto, which is easy to believe--imagine how tedious the average opera libretto would be if read out in incantatory tones without the music to underpin it).
COOK THIEF was often equally nasty, but it kept us riveted to the screen, by virtue of the superb performances of Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren and Alan Howard. Despite a cast that includes Ralph Fiennes and Julia Ormond (both do full-frontal nude scenes, if anyone's interested --given that Fiennes is graphically disembowelled shortly afterwards I don't recommend the film as an erotic diversion), the rigid stylisation of THE BABY OF MACON saps their performances of any energy they might have had under a different director. The dialogue, blending the blank verse of the play with Greenaway's attempt at cod-sixteenth-century speech, is excruciatingly awful--he's always had a tin ear for the English language, and this time round he's deprived of Michael Nyman's music (the music he used could have come from any baroque CD compilation chosen at random, for all the effect they have).
The film is, as usual with Greenaway, crammed to bursting with ideas and extra-cinematic references. There are nods to the barbarity and corruption under the aristocratic surface of the Medici clan, there are debates on religion and its attitude towards the miraculous, and there's a full-scale exploration of the age-old theme of illusion versus reality, as the miracle play 'The Baby of Macon' is performed before the Medici court, and the events depicted gradually spill over into real life, culminating in the scene where an actress (Ormond), is actually raped 217 times by her fellow actors (the number is, as with everything in Greenaway, meant to signify something or other).
But despite the fact that this agonisingly protracted gang rape is almost immediately followed by the graphic dismemberment of the baby of the title, by this stage much of the audience is too comatose with boredom to care--one can neither get a kick out of it or be shocked by it, and that's the most shocking thing about the film. There's no centre to give it focus, no Prospero, no Thief. It's two hours of elaborate costumes, scenery and philosophical ideas in desperate search of a reason for their existence.
As always with Greenaway, design and cinematography (Ben Van Os, Jan Roelfs, Sacha Vierny) are stunning--especially considering the relatively low budget. But then they usually are with these collaborators, and the cast is perfectly adequate considering the script they had to put up with. It's a powerful example of auteurism gone mad, of a film-maker so convinced that what he is doing is absolutely right that he removes everything that audiences might be interested in (characters we care about, stories worth following) in the assumption that the power of his vision is enough to keep our eyes riveted to the screen. Well it isn't--and one hopes the colossal commercial failure of THE BABY OF MACON helps get the message across.
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