There’s a moment early on in Peter Greenaway’s film when you know it’s not going to end well. Brian Dennehy’s architect, Kracklite, is pompously explaining the importance of Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity and his place on a one-pound note (for younger readers, it’s true), and promptly loses the note, which we then see set alight by a candle.
Half an hour later Kracklite is writing postcards to his long-dead architect hero Boullee, of his suspicions his wife is having an affair (she is) and she is poisoning him (she might be). Welcome to the mad, bad world of Peter Greenaway.
His work is usually seen as esoteric, arthouse, inaccessible, highbrow, beautiful to look at but ultimately a dead end. Belly may well be the one film that changed that view although The Draughtsman’s Contract remains my personal favourite. There may be two reasons for that. Firstly there is no clean but Spartan Michael Nyman soundtrack here Wim Mertens steps in and the central performance by Brian Dennehy is as large as his eponymous belly.
Dennehy, surrounded by all of the usual Greenaway touches stunning visuals, sloppy acting, stilted dialogue is simply stupendous, a literally massive presence who is slowly stripped of all he holds dear and ends in tragedy. His Kracklite is a classic over-reacher, an architect who has built little, and would have completed even fewer projects were it not for his rich, young wife (Webb). He is intent on mounting an exhibition of his hero, Louis-Etienne Boullee, in Rome an American putting on a show about a Frenchman in Italy.
Slowly but surely it all starts to fall away he has terrible stomach cramps, his wife falls for a younger Italian man, and no-one in Rome seems to be interested in Boullee a man who also completed few buildings in his career and may even have been a fascist. As Kracklite says though, surely Italians would appreciate a fascist architect?
Kracklite is a classic tragic figure, doomed from the moment he enters Italy, yet Dennehy infuses him with enormous pathos, dignity, wit and sadness. It may be hard to like him but it’s impossible not to sympathise with his plight, framed in a series of exquisite shots of Rome. The scene where his doctor tells him the news after a rectal examination is quite stunning, amazingly moving, a scene where no-one says what they are actually thinking.
There’s the bonus feature of a 15-minute doc by Greenaway on Terence Conran, almost funny in its absurd seriousness, but worth sticking with for an uncredited score by Nyman. Conran comes across as a match for Greenaway’s pomposity.
Overall verdict: This is the latest in the BFI series of Greenaway’s work, and has scrubbed up superbly. Greenaway would go on to become more obscure and unwatchable, but here he’s at his peak.
Special features:
Short: Insight: Terence Conran (15 mins)
DVD-ROM with score
Booklet
Reviewer: Mike Martin