Peter Greenaway's fantasia on a theme of William Shakespeare puts forth a myriad of stage tricks and screen tricks -- smoke, lightning flashes, colored spotlights, inserts, overlaps, framing devices -- and a myriad of pudenda and penises besides. All in all, it makes the Elizabethan playwright look like the most straightforward, plainspoken, all-business and no-nonsense story-spinner. (That's not meant as a compliment to our present Elizabethan filmmaker.) The fact that it boasts the most indecipherably crowded image since the larger-scaled productions of Georges Méliès -- cinemagician par excellence -- cannot be an accident. Nothing in a Greenaway movie is an accident. Most of this one is staged at such a ten-foot-pole distance as to promote total disengagement (and perhaps the periodic catnap), although a handful of closeups of puke, piss, and poop on the pages of rare books, representing the critical views of Caliban on the field of literature, reaffirm momentarily Greenaway's unique power to repel. Sir John Gielgud, who after all had a role in Caligula too, takes the whole thing in majestic stride. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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