Adam. Eve. Branch. Tree. Apple. Penis. Mount of Venus. Cock. Vagina. Rose. Kiss. Sky.
Words blaze across the screen. There are words on naked bodies (Man: Property of God). There are words in cursive script: the pondering of rear entry sex yields doggy, then dog and god. An omnipresent narrator (Ramsey Nasr) offers still more words, rolled as theatrically as human oral anatomy will allow. To this outpouring we might add our own words. Like cuckoo bananas.
There's no doubting that Goltzius and the Pelican Company is the work of the same auteur who gifted us such dazzling, taboo-baiting wonders as The Draftsman's Contract, Prospero's Books and (arguably his masterpiece) The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. But Peter Greenaway's wildly imaginative treatment of an early episode from the history of the printing press can be as hectoring as it is playful.
The plot, as played out in a series of visual associations, concerns Hendrick Goltzius (Nasr), a late-16th-century Dutch engraver of erotic prints, who brings his troupe of models, known as the Pelican Company, to visit the Margrave of Alsace (F Murray Abraham). He convinces the Margrave into funding a printing press so that he might publish illustrations depicting the more depraved parts of the Bible.
The Company, which includes such beautiful people as Walking on Sunshine's beachside hunk Giulio Berruti, are soon naked and cavorting to the themes of Lot and his daughters, David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah, Joseph and Potiphar, and John the Baptist and Salome.
For all the ornate ruffs, fabulously choreographed tableaux and writhing flesh on display, there’s something unsatisfactorily contrarian about the director’s heavily (and pointedly) digitised baroque. Somewhere in the deluge of signifiers there are fascinating ideas about the incestuous relations between the sacred and profane, art as prostitution and prostitution as art, and the compromises that come with patronage (or, more pertinently, international co-producers). Embedded in Greenaway’s pixels is the same principle that guided Goltzius: where there are pictures, there are filthy pictures.
This is the second instalment – following 2007's Nightwatching – in Greenaway's Dutch Masters sequence. His incoming Hieronymous Bosch film, due in 2016 to mark the 500th anniversary of Bosch's death – is going to be one hell of a show.
