8-1/2 Women

What makes Peter Greenaway think he has enough in common with Federico Fellini to invoke Fellini's most celebrated work? Well, they do share a Renaissance-painterly way with the camera, a Swiftian horror of the human body, a contempt for men, and an attitude toward women of bafflement and awe. Of course, Greenaway is a sadistic misanthrope, and his idea of paying tribute to women means (to paraphrase Steve Martin) placing them on a pedestal high enough that he can look up their dresses.

Greenaway's protagonists here -- a grieving, recently widowed banker (John Standing) and his hedonistic son (Matthew Delamere) -- are inspired by the erotic variety of women in Fellini's film to acquire their own harem, which consists of the title number of women (one's a legless waif named Giulietta -- get it?), but they find themselves no more able to control their concubines than they can the earthquakes that plague them wherever they go. To the men (and to Greenaway?), women are a foreign land, like Japan (where much of the action takes place), that one may visit but never truly comprehend. Even Greenaway cultists may think he handled these ideas more satisfyingly in Drowning by Numbers. Everyone else should pass up this Freudian hogwash -- and the misuse of such actresses as Toni Collette, Amanda Plummer, Vivian Wu, and Polly Walker -- in favor of Fellini's own much funnier ode to sexual confusion.

-- Gary Susman