Peter Greenaway
8 DONNE e ½

"Do you think they’ll show a Fellini movie on the plane?" I don't think Peter is paying homage to Federico but draws inspiration from the issue raised by the Romagnolo about the systematic lack of yearning for the alchemical marriage with daring trials of communication between the sexes, which more often than not drives them apart instead of bringing them together.

I sense a dotting the i’s of the onanistic cloud that eventually affects all directors, all except Marco Ferreri and this Welshman, who takes the angelic asexuality of Fellini's cabalistic flow as a basis for revising libido.

"How many directors make films to satisfy their sexual fantasies? I imagine most of them do," in a conversation between father and son. This is where the problem lies, in the self-indulgence that renowned filmmakers "midway through their life’s journey" are eager to showcase. And all the aesthetics, the artistic flights of fancy, the mystery, the magnificence of grasping the depths of the human soul crumble into an unstoppable "lewd" exhibitionist urge dressed in a beige raincoat.

It’s clear that the man from Newport doesn't think of this comparison, it's evident that he's minding his own business; it's us who, by connecting the dots of copulative comparisons, notice the "I dream fellatio" derailment of the unmasked "masters" of cinematography: the clumsy mishap is blatant, for example, in Kubrick when he can't wait to show Kidman's bony backside, orgies included, in the lesbian scene of Mulholland Drive where Lynch is visibly peeking through the keyhole, in Cronenberg’s alien gynecological tools in Dead Ringers, and so on. Impotence plays nasty tricks and is not cured with a "just let me see it, just let me touch it..."

Greenaway is not reverential; he ignites headstrong Dharma frictions. Even if they are beautiful suppositions, he evolves the collective psyche and proposes nothing consolatory or kind-hearted. No absolutions are sought; the inevitability of our state of possession is embraced, making us stand erect (sometimes) and always ready with an exposed back. Finally, someone who takes responsibility for blatantly displaying sexism, machismo, penis envy, racism, violence, classism, indifference, and a lack of awareness that honestly (and ruthlessly) reveals the misery of humanity’s "every man for himself" race where collapse is, at this point, inevitable.

Greenaway proposes unwilling voyeurism, absent voyeurism, impersonal voyeurism, misleading voyeurism, voyeurism that lays new grounds for a decadence that isn’t merely about wishing to have a couple fewer ribs to indulge oneself orally. Here lies the realization of voyeurism and the implementation of countermeasures to confront this possession on the same grounds.

Greenaway's nudity (and its derivatives) is a nudity without malice, a nudity not adorned with maniacal traits to be later sold on the market of earthly desires. Nothing is sold here; experiments are conducted to demonstrate the discovery of tepid water of cheap perversions marked by the limit of deflorable holes. The fantastical portrayal of sexual desires indulged at will is not tempting enough to resolve the film’s final merry-go-round where that premature ejaculation is absolved by abstaining, time traveling aboard imploded sperm cells.

But Greenaway’s cynicism suggests that the only path to follow is Fellini's mercy, which unmasks through compassion the robotic sexual obsession. In Fellini’s harem of a 1/2 quest for access to the vaginal at will, there’s no animal arousal. Thus, the British director "plays" at tempting each of us by showcasing a range of "brides" that fulfill carnal desires, hypnotizing the deviated psychic of all. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? But there’s always a price to pay, and when women are involved, the price is always high; women want blood...

And like father, like son, the unraveling of the story raises the bar of endurance, and those untrained for heavy play have compassion for human flesh as worms feast on it. And here’s the right Peter, not the Pan, and his "green path" is a road full of crossroads where nothing can be left to chance, and the alienation produced should be faced with an enduring millennial shell. Without this age-old metal coating, we would be exposed to misunderstandings and rejections due to the still unclosed mesh that inevitably cause perforations, bringing inevitable setbacks. But if we had the grace to possess a sturdy lifeline that doesn’t trip at the slightest short circuit, the derailment proposed by the pachinko spheres is logical in its absurdity.

And if Fellini, in his 8 and a half sought to channel the absurdity of a logic of women, bending it to a male logic-consuming, Greenaway observes that the clock to give the exact time, just to stay in the Swiss context, needs both the spring (the male) and the anchor (the female) to work on the same frequency of the divine fifty-fifty, and seeks neither to explain nor convince anyone. He relies on the nature of things for final adjustments, and the fit is not forced; all the pieces fall into place as they should, how everything happens.

And here the director doesn’t consider sex as an obsession but as a consequence, and in the absent representation of filming, he reveals the playful purity of the act that nullifies personal desires. Tantric in his disappearance of the grip with the desired subject, he doesn’t wink at the spectator with reproductive urges, and by canceling the call of the species, he suggests a seminal retention that opens visions of normally invisible zones, involving sperm cells in a backward race from the egg to make it clear that all this reproductive frenzy nurtures that ego that isn’t ours, that isn’t who we are, undermining the whimsical yearning for eternal youth.

And this cynical and ruthless purity between the meeting of man and woman, this absent ascent, produces a dry orgasm that erases the vehicle's biological functionality and temporarily removes it from the vampirism of stars and possessions. No function is given to people. And when the consideration of love appears, death immediately appears as well. Everything floats in an air that is not induced, I dare say it's not found, there’s a backward journey in our original androgyny. But this is the greatest gift, a Socratic estrangement of the "I continue to not understand a damn thing" seasoned with a psychic squirting that rinses away the pre-established yin and yang by the system.

The hope of a troglodyte screw-everything mind-set by other directors is surpassed by Peter’s showing yes, the wet pleasures but of an astral broth, a call to the divine that the creative act imposes, opening to a consciousness calling from beyond and beading us with objectivity transforming us into transcending conduits.

And the game of a hard shaft at all costs lasts only as long as the illusion does, the illusion of trying to have even the soul’s shaft masturbated, marking the complete shipwreck. This hope on the part of the male universe of eventually encountering a horizontal haven completes the hole of a boat that drowns in its own semen.

And with all the butts, bumps, and glutes available, one ends up desiring the posterior rounds of the boar Ortens, and a butcher reminded me that pigs have the closest configuration to humans. The failure to endure happiness persists.

And with these women and a half, according to critics, Greenaway "delivers an atrocious piece bordering on the ridiculous, utterly disjointed, which cost him the clear irritation of his devoted fans," yet he solves the proselytism problem of his cinema by spotting followers also always ready with the hand slipping to the lower belly area and purging the misunderstanding of a self-indulgent calling that doesn’t belong to him.

In one scene of the film, there’s explicit talk of those advanced sexual clichés, including bondage, where the maid offering them is rejected at the audition. Shadows of pleasures are sought at this point, projected then in Swiss land, and what better place than the bank state of VaticUNO? The sneakiness of "messor non porta pena" that Switzerland invests in.

Given the near absence of musical backgrounds, the Japanese set acts as the soundtrack with the noise of pinball-slots, the humming of TVs transmitting Sumo wrestling, the clicking of wooden sandals of Kabuki actors, the roar of earthquakes. And those quakes imported to Geneva put a cross over the suffering of "like when a loved person laughs at you".

"I love sleeping, you were conceived in this bed. Then at that time you weren’t sleeping. Maybe your mother was..." (conversation between Emmenthal father and son).

"I’ve wanted to give him head since then" (Palmira speaking about her father with Storey).

The old Emmenthal explains the neighbors from Austria: "I’ve always had major issues with Austrians, a negative, musical, bigoted, rigid, authoritarian people. They always insist that their garbage bins are super clean".

Simato, Griselda, Beryl, Gioconda, Palmira, Mio, Kito, Giulietta, Clothilde: you shall have no other 8 1/2 besides them!

"This narcissism is starting to get rather boring, isn't it?"

Let's all play the three monkeys, please: "All to myself Alone".