8½ Women

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1999

8½ Women
Peter Greenaway
UNITED KINGDOM/ THE NETHERLANDS/ GERMANY/LUXEMBOURG, 1999
121 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Movie Masters/ Woodline Productions/Continent Films/Delux Productions
Executive Producers: Terry Glinwood, Bob Hubar, Denis Wigman
Producer: Kees Kasander
Screenplay: Peter Greenaway
Cinematographer: Sacha Vierny
Editor: Elmer Leupen
Production Designer: Wilbert Van Dorp, Emi Wada
Sound: Garth Marshall
Principal Cast: John Standing, Matthew Delamere, Vivian Wu, Amanda Plummer, Polly Walker, Toni Collette
Production: Movie Masters

Exactly ten years after he shocked the world with The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Peter Greenaway has returned with another caustic, keenly observed and very funny swipe at the haute bourgeoisie. Yet instead of expressing Cook’s angry, gory disgust with Thatcherite economic vengefulness, 8½ Women takes on the imitative decadence and disposability of fin-de-millennium culture. Like its predecessor, this film too will incite hostile reactions from those morally implicated by its contents.

This is also Greenaway’s most purely cinematic work in some time. The painterly studies and superimposed literature which have informed his recent films give way to a playful rethinking of the sixties cinema of class conflict and decadence, especially Buñuel, Anderson and (of course) Fellini. Greenaway fans will also delight in his new approach to old themes, such as the mechanics of collecting things, and his irreverent way (after The Pillow Book) with contemporary Japanese culture.

Philip Emmenthal, a wealthy Geneva businessman, inherits eight-and-a-half Pachinko parlours, the ubiquitous gambling/pinballesque storefronts throughout Japan. His son, Storey, manages them and becomes enamored of all things Japanese. When Philip’s wife and Storey’s mother dies, the son comforts the father by introducing him to the women of Fellini’s masterpiece, 8½. The father and son imagine a private bordello of their own making on their massive Geneva estate.

They begin collecting women at once in Storey’s beloved Japan. But the subverted desires and complex agendas of their human acquisitions thwart their grandiose plans.

Greenaway always attracts top-drawer actors to his projects and 8½ Women is no exception. Vivian Wu, Amanda Plummer, Polly Walker and Toni Collette are four of the women in question; the complexity of their performances creates even more complicated political readings in this unusually provocative film.
—Noah Cowan