Greenaway's `8 1/2 Women': Fellini might have liked it

Movie review

XXX "8 1/2 Women," with John Standing, Matthew Delamere, Vivian Wu, Amanda Plummer, Toni Collette, Polly Walker. Written and directed by Peter Greenaway. 116 minutes. Egyptian. "R" - restricted because of nudity, sex scenes, language.

The first half-hour of Peter Greenaway's latest picture may be the funniest stretch of celluloid he's ever written and directed. The rest of "8 1/2 Women" is less spirited, but the casting of the central roles is so inspired it hardly matters.

John Standing and Matthew Delamere perform a kind of art-house vaudeville act as Philip and Storey Emmenthal, a father-and-son team who seem willing to try anything to get through a rough patch in their lives. Philip has suddenly become a widower, Storey now has no mother, and they're both desperate to fill the vacuum.

Philip retreats from the world, crawling into his empty bed, but Storey won't let him. He does and says the most outrageous things, partly to keep his father's mind off their loss, partly because he can't help himself.

"Why do you keep saying things like that?" asks Philip after a particularly wild bit of repartee.

"I'm bonding," says Storey.

At the outset, they don't seem to know each other very well. Philip wonders if Storey might be gay, Storey assures him that he has all the male genitalia he needs in his life, and before long they've stocked their Swiss mansion with a harem. Thoughts of taking one on a slow boat to China are expressed, Dennis Potter-style, in song.

The inspiration for this is Philip and Storey's visit to a screening of Fellini's "8 1/2," with its parade of fantastic, larger-than-life women who seem designed to capitalize on the sexual fantasies of the filmmaker - and audience.

However, Philip and Storey's women, including Toni Collette as a fierce bank cashier, Vivian Wu as a schizzy businesswoman and Amanda Plummer as an obsessive horse-and-pig devotee, prove not to be as manageable as Fellini's.

Also interfering with the harem fantasy are Natacha Amal's always-pregnant golddigger ("I'm good at having babies"), Kirina Mano as a melancholy woman fixated on female impersonators, Polly Walker as a connoisseur of aging male flesh, Barbara Sarafian as a vengeful maid and Manna Fujiwara as a "half woman" with no legs.

This being a Greenaway movie, half the cast ends up stripping, and there's no shyness about full-frontal nudity. Outraged that he can't wear white at his wife's funeral, Philip removes all his clothes, wondering who will donate some black underwear so he can proceed.

What could have been merely a wince-worthy moment is stretched into hilarity by the casual tone of everyone in the funeral party. Fellini, who knew something about locating the comedy in public embarrassment, might well have approved.

"Do you think I'll ever get to see an in-flight Fellini movie?," jokes Storey at one point. Probably not. Nor is "8 1/2 Women" likely to be showing up in-flight any time soon.

But this is the closest Greenaway has come to something like a mainstream entertainment. Much of it is a hoot.