Cinema
The Belly of an Architect (`15', selected cinemas)
Carnivorous city
Hilary Mantel
Kracklite comes to the Eternal City to die; but crossing the Italian border on a train, he impregnates his wife. While he gasps and shudders in the act of creation, the camera lingers on passing cemeteries. I do not know if it is an Italian habit to build tombs by railway lines, but it would delight director Peter Greenaway if the people going somewhere and the people going nowhere could look at each other in this fashion; it would suit his peculiar sense of decorum. Some of the parallels and corres- pondences he sets up are as crass as those of the opening moments; some are subtle, elegant and distinguished. Everyone will have his own opinion about which are which.
The central character (Brian Dennehy) never forgets his vocation; he signs himself Stourley Kracklite, Architect. His own buildings do not sound promising: his wife Louisa describes the house he has built for them as 'two marble cubes and a brick sphere on stilts'. Design is notably absent in Kracklite's own make-up, for he is a huge, shapeless, shambling man, of mas- sive and uncontrolled passions and ardours. Gleefully he describes Rome as full of 'carnivorous architecture'. Louisa reminds him — she has a knack of spoiling his illusions — that 'my father was Italian and he was very thin and only interested in money.'
Kracklite is in Rome to organise an exhibition of the work of the 18th-century architect Etienne-Louis Boullee. Boullee concerned himself with the mathematics of construction, and planned a monument to Isaac Newton. His best work remained on paper, and he never visited Rome. The architect needs collaborators, or he is doomed to a wishful sterility, but Kracklite finds his Italian hosts and colleagues to be self-serving cheats, intent on mocking him, denigrating his work, and seducing his wife. Their hostility to him is not ex- plained, but visually expressed: large and florid in his white suit, he strides through the city flanked by its thin, black-garbed, olivaceous natives, and when he is broken, drunk, writhing in pain, they stare and dip and bob around him like the torturers of Christ in Renaissance art.
Kracklite is on top of his wife again when the first spasm of sickness takes hold of him. 'Don't start what you can't finish,' the charmless creature drawls. Soon after- wards, she leaves him. The Italians begin to take over the exhibition and wreck it. A doctor diagnoses his illness as 'too much egotism', but in fact he has a terminal cancer — an architectural, pyramid-shaped tumour — that eats away at him for nine months.
It is easy to make Rome look beautiful, and the director and his cinematographer have let the city take on a larger presence than the human actors. Shots are framed with a masterly calmness, and the camera remains still while the people scuttle be- tween monuments which dwarf their con- cerns. The technique follows the theme, and in this film common sense and com- mon humanity never interfere with the perfect composition. Six people sit at a table, between them a bowl of fruit. Someone speaks. We see one side of the table, the bowl of fruit; like a classical frieze. Someone else speaks; we see the other side of the table, the same bowl of fruit. The human eye craves a respite; we are caught in some kind of cerebral Wimb- ledon. Then there is Louisa (Chloe Webb), with her uncomplicated sportsgirl's face and her white dresses. The viewer's im- agination sets off on a little excursion of its own, and half a dozen little pieces of erudition go for nothing. Blink. and you miss an allusion. Catch one, and you congratulate yourself. Mr Greenaway has pulled you into his game.
A strange and appalling feature of the film is Chloe Webb's performance. Granted she plays a woman of fabulous stupidity, who receives with no surprise the information that Robert Graves was a mortuary attendant; but that is no reason for her apparent unfamiliarity with the normal cadences of spoken English. Brian Dennehy carries the enterprise, kindling human warmth in a waste of marmoreal style. He engages the sympathy but if the director allows him to do so, it is not for the sake of arousing emotion, but to draw the audience further into his world of symbols and dream logic.
The ineptitude of some performances, the lifeless antiphonal dialogue, the sacri- fice of plausibility to style, the would-be aphorisms that fall flat, the odd ludic solemnity: there is enough here to alienate most viewers, but nothing to leave them indifferent. With trepidation, and many reservations, I recommend, this film, for however much you dislike it, you may find that it has helped to furnish some corner of your imagination. It will not be one of the year's best-loved enterprises, but it is certainly one of the most interesting.
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