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| Courtesy of Strand Releasing |
From his second hallucinatory period feature The
Draughtsman’s Contract in 1982 to his operatic sucker punch The Cook,
the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, England’s artistic and intellectual
successor to Ken Russell whose films are arguably even more daring than the
aforementioned enfant-terrible isn’t slowing down even if his films are either
censored or blocked from distribution in the US outright. Like Russell before him, Greenaway dabbles
frequently in historical fiction with a judicious amount of artifice, forming
an aesthete that is neither stage theater nor straightforward cinema.
Considering how fastidious and unbending Greenaway’s
treatments of his real and imagined personages onscreen with acute attention to
symmetrical framing and carefully composed structuralist vistas, it was only a
matter of time before Britain’s cinematic vision of the future would circle
back to one of the titans of Russia’s cinematic past in Sergei Eisenstein. Considered a pioneer in film theory and
montage with his silent epics Battleship Potemkin, October and Strike,
Eisenstein like his contemporaries Fritz Lang or Georges Méliès was something
of a scientist generating revolutionary lab experiments for the silver screen.
Still studied over a fine-toothed comb frame by frame in classrooms,
the films of Eisenstein continued to grow in prowess over his transition to the
sound era with Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible and eventually
he found himself in America hobnobbing with Charlie Chaplin and Walt
Disney. Though his time in America was
unproductive, it formulated between author Upton Sinclair, his wife and
Eistenstein’s colleagues a so-called Mexican Film Trust purporting for
Eisenstein to make a film about Mexico his way.
Which
now brings us to Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato, a
fictionalized speculation on why the director’s time spent in Mexico in 1931 on
the unfinished film project ¡Que viva México! fell apart and why it
prompted his eventual return to Russia.
Much like The Music Lovers before it, Guanajuato zeroes in
on the gulf between creative genius and personal battles with homosexuality
threatening his public image and career.
As Sergei Eisenstein (played brilliantly by Finnish actor Elmer Bäck) settles
in Mexico chaperoned by his guide Palomino (Luis Alberti) while staying in the
man’s home with his wife and children, Eisenstein and Palomino initiate an
illicit love affair which threatens to torpedo the project altogether.
Partially
a multimedia-history lesson with frequent split screens showcasing pictures or
either Eisenstein himself or clips from his films, partially a speculation on
what happened during that period between his silent era and his eventual transition
into the sound era, Peter Greenaway’s daring, sensual and sometimes raunchy
epic is perhaps one of the most thorough investigations into the life of a
creative cinematic genius yet attempted.
In the time-honored tradition of Greenaway, the film is handsomely,
precisely composed visually thanks to cinematographer Reinier van Brummelen and
employs a wealth of obvious artifice including but not limited to green screen
effects and exaggerated lighting to using CGI to bend the corners of the image almost
like a split diopter.
Sound wise,
the film uses a cacophony of classical music of the period, ranging from music
used in Eisenstein’s films to the sounds of the Mexican holiday Day of the
Dead, as sensorily overwhelming on the ears as the eyes. Mostly the film is
comprised of rapid-fire dialogue spat out with feverish intensity and animation
by Elmer Bäck who gives us an extraordinary Sergei Eisenstein.
So
alive, awake and hyper at all times, you wonder how the director didn’t give
himself a heart attack. Much of his
screentime is spent either half or completely naked, sometimes getting into
arguments with investors with his private parts exposed. Also strong is Luis Alberti who shares more
than a few steamy gay sex scenes with Elmer Bäck, pushing the film freely into
NC-17 territory while also probing the emotional psyche of Eisenstein.
As always,
Greenaway’s work however lush, ornate and ingenious, continues to be shoved
aside in extremely limited releases which comes as no surprise given the recurring
extremities the Welsh provocateur deploys but is nevertheless a disappointment
for filmgoers who have to jump through flaming hula hoops to so much as even
see his films.
Granted
a limited theatrical run in America by the LGBTQ friendly distributor Strand
Releasing before going on-demand, Eisenstein in Guanajuato while not as
strong as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is through and
through unexpurgated Greenaway and for Russian film lovers a fascinating
investigation into one of Russia’s most important film directors. Yes the film dabbles freely in fiction but
much of the probable conjecture onscreen about one of the film world’s true
geniuses is the product of modern cinema’s very own and wholly original
masterminds who continues to push the envelope and change the ways in which we
perceive movies.
--Andrew Kotwicki
