"Dickens? Heavens no! A Dickens heroine would never let you see her sitting on the loo. A Jane Austen heroine just might."
Despite its title (an obvious reference to Fellini's Otto e Mezzo), 8 1/2 Women is more of an homage to the wicked dialogue of Oscar Wilde than to the corpus of the celebrated Italian filmmaker. Or at least it is an homage to Wilde at first. The exchanges in the opening scenes between Philip Emmanthal (John Standing) and his son Storey (Matthew Delamere) are typical of the world-weary decadence that Wilde bestowed on his aristocrats at the turn of the 20th century.
The main difference between the typical Oscar Wilde play and this particular film by Peter Greenaway is not the attitudes of the characters (separated by a century), but the presentation. Whereas Wilde allowed his wickedness to be constrained by the parameters of his culture, Greenaway insists on having wickedness run amok.
The reader who has anything approaching respect for Victorian values and prudery will want to stop reading this review right now. I'm deadly serious about this; do not continue reading if you are easily (or even uneasily) offended. It is impossible to talk about 8 1/2 Women without touching on some very touchy subject matter. The film is downright flippant about full frontal male nudity and quite explicit in its exploration of father-son incest, homosexuality (redundant at this point), and bestiality. No readers offended by anything as commonplace as interracial sex should have made it to this point of the review, but even the most jaded viewers may be disconcerted to find themselves guffawing when Philip Emmanthal blandly asks his son,
"You've never slept with a corpse, I take it?"
The fact that the question is asked while Mrs. Emmanthal's fresh corpse is still in the Emmanthal mansion should make it even more objectionable, but the brilliantly blase portrayal of the Emmanthal men by Delamere and Standing manages to inject genuine comedic content into such lines.
There are a number of fabulously quotable lines in this film, such as "Do you ever think I'll get to see an in-flight Fellini movie?", "It's a reputable cemetery," and my favorite, "Men love women; women love children; and children love hamsters. It's a one-way slide with little going back the other way." (Honorable mention goes to Philip's attack on Piet Mondrian: "You know in order to keep his rigid, sterile paintings from seeming completely dead, Mondrian's admirers are forever pointing out that he was a lively tango dancer, as if that is enough to make him seem a little more human.")
The great dialogue is so heavily concentrated in the beginning of the film, however, that it eventually becomes disappointingly tedious.Perhaps the most important and amusing exchange between the Emmanthals occurs about ten minutes into the film:
Philip: Are you gay?
Storey: Certainly not. I've always been too excited about my own pr*ck to build up much enthusiasm for anyone else's.
P: Then why haven't you settled down with a woman?
S: I suppose it's your fault for installing that full-length mirror on my armoire. Ever since I saw myself naked in that mirror, I've wanted to be double-jointed so that I could kiss my pr*ck good night.
P: Find yourself a woman to kiss your pr*ck good night for you. All of this narcissism eventually becomes quite boring. . . . Let's change the subject.
S: But you're my father. Why can't I discuss sex with you? Your interest in sex got me here.
P: Why do you say things like that?
S: We're bonding.
If the purpose of pornography is indeed to excite the prurient desires of the viewer, then 8 1/2 Women is not pornographic. Nothing in the film even approaches the realm of the erotic. But most viewers would be hard-pressed not to categorize the film as obscene. It's often obscene in a funny way, but obscene nevertheless. For instance, when a prostitute defiantly asks Storey Emmanthal what he can possibly show her that she hasn't seen before, the film cuts drastically to a dusty courtyard in which a theatrically-dressed female Kabuki aspirant (who dreams of being a female impersonator, so that she can be more female than she is) sings a seeming lovesong to a garter-wearing pig named Hortense.
The apparent moral of the story is almost intellectually compelling. The Emmanthal men discover that the problem of trying to keep a harem of 8 1/2 women is that their desires cease to be whetted by concubines that are too eager to please. Eventually, they begin to take more pleasure in being ordered about by their concubines than in expecting their own fantasies to be fulfilled. But there simply isn't enough good dialogue in the middle of the film to make this lesson worth sticking around for.
Additionally, the film falls into the same boring trajectory as such other numerical titles as The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen. We have to watch the Emmanthal's collect their 8 1/2 concubines, each one with a different story and different reasons for joining the harem. Advancement of the story is exchanged for a series of rather tedious character sketches. Every now and then, the patient viewer is rewarded with something amusing, but the wait hardly seems worthwhile.
The denouement of the film can only be described as obligatory. The intellectual point of the film calls for the women to abandon the private bordello one at a time. There is one touching scene in which the Emmanthal men, trying to be more callous than they are, attempt to determine a destination for one of their women by sticking a pin in an airline schedule. But they keep rejecting one city after another for reasons that border on compassion for the woman they are trying to get rid of. Otherwise, however, the departures are unimaginative and perfunctory.
If only John Standing's genitalia could have managed to be a little bit more amusing, then I suppose Greenaway would have had something here. As it is, however, I don't think the occasionally sparkling conversation really warrants jumping through so many hoops. I watched this movie only because it's showing currently on DirecTV's foreign film channel (180 on my system) and because the alternative was an action-comedy. I'm sure it was better than the action-comedy--but not as much better as it could have been.
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