Eight and Half Women

The last woman, that arrives to their brothel is the only one that arrives out of her own free will and is also the one desired the most by both, the son and the father. She slowly turns the leading role, starts controlling the house and because of that, pushes the two away from the rest of the women who decide either to run away, or are killed or thrown out.

Greenaway: ...phenomenon common in England now is the idea of men behaving badly. It's a backlash against the feminism of the eighties. Men behave sexually badly in an extravagant and exhibitionist way, in order to take revenge on all the extremes of feminism. It's rather pathetic. There is a way in which we could say, that women have always despised men, especially with the most predatory aspects of their sexuality, but never before the end of twentieth century it was so widely acclaimed. One of the female character in my film says: "men love women, women love children, children love hamsters, and it never works the other way around".

As father dies in the arms of the woman that came to that house last, son thinks of making a movie about this but understands that he might at least end up in jail, so he throws away all the tapes of Fellini movies, renames the half-woman from Giulietta (G. Massina from "La Strada" and "Giullietta degli Spiriti", both movies done by Fellini) to Anna Karina ('Le Petit Soldat' and 'Pierrot le Fou', both by Goddard). As the camera pulls away, we see that the earthquake that was following the son came to Geneva from Japan and destroyed the house with son and half-woman in it.

I think it is best to let the author finish the conversation about the movie since his films cannot be understood completely while watching for the first time:

Greenaway: In this film, among ten characters there is only one really tragic death, which is rare in my films. One woman commits a rather beautiful suicide. Both male characters die happily...

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