Directed by Peter Greenaway | Netherlands/Mexico/Finland/Belgium/France | English & Spanish w/ English subtitles | 2015 | Fiction | 106 mins
Film Source: Strand Releasing
In 1931 the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein travels to Guanajuato to direct his film Que viva México. There he encounters a new culture and its dealings with death; he also discovers another revolution – and his own body. Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover) is more playful and less cerebral here than in some of his previous films. In a hugely enjoyable and entertaining film, he lavishly re-imagines Eisenstein’s experience, consciously borrowing from that filmmaker’s cinematic language (including split-screens, extreme close-ups, and wondrous montages) to paint the transformation of a national hero, a highly conceptual filmmaker, into a flesh and blood man who presents himself as a clown.