I usually avoid Toronto International Film Festival, I mean, what can we have there: doubled ticket price, kilometres of line-ups, waiting forever just to see a celebrity announce movie for a brief two minutes.
New, for us here in Toronto new Greenaway's movie played at the Festival and I went to see it. Festival felt different for some reason, it was peaceful, better organised, even though the scalping was fully operational.
Upon entering, Greenaway's perversion hits you instantaneously. Movie begins with his rendering of the Pillow Book multi-layered style, this time melting of one image into another, making each picture a work of art. An elderly gentleman obtains 8 and ½ Pachinko gambling parlours through debt extortion and is persuaded to keep them by his son who remains in Kyoto running the parlours. Number that keeps repeating throughout the movie, 8 and ½, is the director's homage to the praise of the film, Fellini's '8 ½'.
In Greenaway's words:
I made this film for three reasons. The title "Eight And a Half Woman" obviously refers to Fellini. I think it's the most intelligent movie about the cinema, ever made. Later there were many films like that, but this one is about the very conception, it's about where the ideas come from. It's a very important film for every filmmaker, and it also celebrates Italian Fellini women, in the famous fantasy sequence.
The son of the elderly gentleman becomes addicted to the Pachinko gambling as well as the thrill of Japanese earthquakes. The father's wife and the son's mother dies soon after and the son returns to Switzerland to console his father. Son and father then sleep together in a rather comical setting after which, son tries to get his father hooked on Fellini, but ends up getting him hooked on the women in Fellini's movies. They go to Kyoto where son makes a deal with a woman that owes a significant amount of money to the parlour to be his concubine. Out of sympathy for the father they find him a completely submissive woman, interested in becoming more feminine, in love with a Japanese theatre female impersonator's technique.
They go back to Geneva where they rescue a Norwegian bank employee accused of embezzlement. Through accidental meetings they acquire eight women, they give them rich accommodation, each of the women is kept for a different sexual fantasy, nun, horse-lover, pregnant mother, devoted servant... Inconveniences, such as pregnancy, babies, escapes, are dealt with only philosophically. The picture that I found irresistible was when a Japanese concubine was dancing in front of the brothel/mansion of the father and son and in front of her there was a four-meter long, like a baby elephant large pig. The second-last woman that comes, the half-woman, we always see her only from afar, is a cripple. It is also suggested through the servant's conversation that she might have been a product of a sexual relation between the father and the son.
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