Some were using a lot of words that don't make much sense in a regular conversation 'ravishing incomprehenisbility' trying to make themselves sound pretentious and above art but ending up sounding ridiculous, some were written simply and stated exactly that they were unable to understand the film, but all of them said the same thing. Film does not have a plot as in 'introduction, culmination and resolve' and it does not tell a straightforward story and that just makes no sense. I do not understand why?
Story of the film is Shakespearean, simple; Prospero, former duke of Milan, now in exile due to a political revolution has fled the city with his daughter Miranda, settled on a remote island that the storm crashed them onto and created his own world using his magic and Greenaway asks a question about the library that Prospero valued more than his dukedom, library that was the main source of his magic and power.
Prospero's books, their typography, calligraphy and illustrations are portrayed in detail, basic narrative from Shakespeare is overlaid with pages from his books, given to us for a consideration, slowly changing on screen, layering images one over the other, over the main story that flows from Shakespeare's Tempest.
Images of the human body, naked human body also take up a large portion of the film, this time taking Greenaway's obsession with the body as an art form to the new level. On occasion, I had a feeling that only Prospero and Miranda were allowed to dress up, giving nudity a certain calf/slave quality, but also allowing only to the slaves to express their body as a form of art.
This is not a film for the lovers of Shakespeare, or for the pretentious crowd that tries to understand art. This is a film for the lovers of calligraphy, human body, ancient manuscripts and the era when Europe was slowly moving out of the dark ages.
My generation at the university, at least the literature major crowd, was trying to achieve some air of dignity and pretentiousness by reading James Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake' and watching 'Prospero's Books' by Greenaway. Regarding the first one, I understood that I do not speak French, German, Latin, and the rest of those twenty something languages that the book is
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