Eisen­stein in Guanajuato

Okay, so we need to talk about Peter Greenaway’s fix­a­tion with full frontal male nudi­ty. When the chance arrives to insert flap­ping, jut­ting, wind­milling gen­i­talia into the frame, he swings at it like he would some ornate, phal­lic piñata.

It’s been one of the key char­ac­ter­is­tics of his career, and the effort he is mak­ing to nor­malise depic­tions of the human body and return to a more clas­si­cal, unin­hib­it­ed way of think­ing is cer­tain­ly laud­able in its intent. But in a film like Eisen­stein in Gua­na­ju­a­to this mis­sion appears to have reached crit­i­cal mass, where con­sum­ing the sto­ry becomes a process of pray­ing that he’ll choose to trade one flac­cid wee­nie for just a small scin­til­la of con­ven­tion­al drama.

It’s like that thing where you’re try­ing to have a con­ver­sa­tion with some­one and they’ve got no pants on – it’s hard to main­tain eye con­tact, let alone a train of thought. Here, the Russ­ian pio­neer film direc­tor Sergei Eisen­stein (played by spir­it­ed Fin, Elmer Bäck), arrives in Mex­i­co with the man­date of mak­ing a movie (his fas­ci­nat­ing fol­ly, ¡Que viva Méx­i­co!), but instead opts to explore his own sex­u­al peccadillos.

Green­away fires a mighty jet of infor­ma­tion – both visu­al and aur­al – towards the screen, with each scene exist­ing as a bom­bas­tic minia­ture set-piece and usu­al­ly cli­max­ing in some kind of would-be bawdi­ness. The frame is often used as a flash-card trip­tych, mono­logues duly enhanced with por­traits per­tain­ing to the copi­ous high cul­tur­al ref­er­ences along­side the director’s own rib­ald doodles.

This may read like a damn­ing indict­ment of Greenaway’s project, but the way he shoots and edits would make him the per­fect choice to direct music videos. He films dia­logue scenes with a cam­era that shim­mies and pans dynam­i­cal­ly around the room, across bod­ies, through spaces, inject­ing a false (but nev­er­the­less com­pelling) sense of high urgency into the obscure proceedings.

Rooms always look like sound stages or the­atre stages (nev­er actu­al rooms), empha­sis­ing his appar­ent dis­dain for social real­ism. But this dis­tanc­ing effect achieves just that – it makes it tough to muster a desire to engage with the text. Greenaway’s best work man­ages to mud­dy that divid­ing line between the real and arti­fi­cial, par­tic­u­lar­ly a film like 1989’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

The film comes across as an immac­u­late­ly researched and stir­ring­ly mount­ed biopic which breathes new life into a tired mould. But there’s nev­er a point where you feel like Eisen­stein is any­thing more than a fan­ci­ful cre­ation, the prod­uct of an artist’s mind rather than a cred­i­ble cre­ation. Per­haps com­plain­ing that the film lacks for human­i­ty is miss­ing the point, but if you hap­pen to like your cin­e­ma retooled as a scat­ter­shot his­to­ry les­son intoned by a randy aca­d­e­m­ic, then you could do a lot worse.