Rich Characters, Absurdist Humor in '8 1/2 Women'

Peter Greenaway's "8 1/2 Women" is a nod to Fellini--and that "half" turns out to be a typically dark Greenaway twist. No artistic temperaments could be more different than those of Greenaway and Fellini. Greenaway is the detached, pitiless intellectual whose magistral experimental flourishes can be recondite in the extreme, whereas Fellini is the lyrical, compassionate sensualist who celebrates the beauty of the women in his all-encompassing embrace.

Even the most stunning woman will have her pores revealed in close-up by Greenaway, for whom lust seems invariably dry as dust. (You have to wonder what Greenaway and fellow Brit, painter Lucian Freud, with their common preoccupation with less than perfect flesh, think about each other's work.)

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Yet this film, one of Greenaway's most amusing and accessible, actually arrives at moments of tenderness, even love, fleeting though they may be. "8 1/2 Women" finds Greenaway in a contemplative mood, musing about the interplay of sex and love and mortality, and the bonds between father and son--within the context of mordant absurdist humor, to be sure. It's not that Greenaway has gone soft and sentimental but rather that he's dared to allow a rare drop of humanity to emerge in his characters' relationships with one another.

In jaunty, elliptical fashion Greenaway introduces Philip Emmenthal (John Standing), a Geneva-based financier and banker, in the midst of driving so hard a bargain in acquiring a Kyoto pachinko parlor for his business associate and architect son Storey (Matthew Delamere) that he gets his nose bloodied.

Not long after Storey agrees to accept as a payment of indebtedness the sexual favors of pretty, fiery Simato (Shizuka Inoh), as urged by her father--and her fiance--he has to return to Geneva when his mother dies. Philip is bereft, overcome with the loss of his wife, more a companion than a lover, and Storey suggests that to cheer himself up his father turn his immense period palace into a virtual harem. From Japan (depicted here as constantly rattled by earthquakes) Storey brings Simato; the exquisite Mio (Kirina Mano), whose goal is to be more female than the Kabuki's female impersonators; and his father's relentlessly efficient representative Kito (Vivian Wu).