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Rating: "Going beyond the frame's boundaries and the slavery of the lens. Paraphrasing Picasso, filming what you think and not what you see."
P. Greenaway
Can a single film contain the synthesis of the visual and artistic arts of the 20th century and the epitome of theatrical representation par excellence, in a visionary orgy of lights, editing, colors, sets, costumes, and manneristic elegance among the most fascinating and complex ever seen by the human eye?
The answer is YES, if the film goes by the name "Prospero's Book" (in Italian: "The Last Tempest"), an incredible film from 1991 by that iconoclastic and imaginative genius Peter Greenaway, a director/painter/sculptor/literary figure who is always at the forefront and has already given us eccentric and fascinating masterpieces like "Drowning by Numbers," "The Belly of an Architect," "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," "The Baby of Mâcon" and others.
In this film, the eccentric English director draws abundantly from "The Tempest" by W. Shakespeare (written around 1611) and reworks it, especially visually, highlighting the tragic and decadent aspect of the work considered one of the pinnacles of theatrical production of all time.
A choral film, without real protagonists, deliberately staged in a theatrical form with real moving tableaux that intersect on different levels in a truly hallucinatory journey for the eyes that struggle to follow the highly elaborate images and their alternation as in a continuous ballet with endless scene changes, choreography, and costumes.
An unparalleled visual masterpiece made possible thanks to highly elaborate avant-garde programs both for digital filming and for the sophisticated editing at the edge of human comprehension. A true kaleidoscope of baroque, rococo art and renaissance charm set up by blending together literature (extensive the written and narrated parts), ballet (with almost angelic and divine choreographies and movements at the same time), bel canto, and music (beautiful the soundtrack by Michael Nyman), illustration (sophisticated illustrated interventions within the scenes), graphics (the screen composition often fracturing and multiplying in Mondrian-like compositions with significant influences from the aesthetics of late 17th-century painters), circus (the numerous circus interventions of jugglers and acrobats present in many scenes are amazing) and more.
A true triumph of Total Art in its utmost exception of the term where the only weak aspects, if we really want to nitpick, lie precisely in the "filmic" structure of the work, which here seems a mere pretext for a film that traces more the path of a highly elevated stylistic exercise but has very little grip on the emotional and purely narrative part of the story.
An excessive, redundant, and visionary film of truly breathtaking aesthetic beauty that is difficult to describe in its complexity but leaves us somewhat sterile and cold on the narrative part without ever really capturing our heart. Perhaps too long concerning the technique used, this film leaves us at the end with a sense of total dizziness where the eyes are more than satisfied while the heart remains too starved of any deep emotion.
Further viewings of the film would be of no use to fully appreciate the grand amount of details that go unnoticed due to the many levels of image elaboration. And perhaps it's only in the play of excess, the taste for the carnivalesque grotesque, and the purely aesthetic dimension, the key to fully appreciating a film unique of its kind that, never as in this case, and contrary to 95% of films circulating today, manages to SPEAK to the eyes and ALMOST NOTHING to the mind.
A film that, despite being released in 1991 (16 years ago!!!) could very well give a hard time to many contemporary films that could NEVER match this masterpiece in image beauty and overall visionariness.
Recommended for aesthetes, graphic designers, directors, art directors, image devotees, and decadent dandies with a taste for beauty as the sublimation of the divine. To be avoided by those looking for emotions and a traditional story to follow and become passionate about.
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