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I'm a Greenaway enthusiast, but I cannot recommend this film to those looking for a Greenaway experience. I often recommend those that I think are failures, like 8 1/2 Women, because it fails in an interesting way; the goals don't fit the skills.But this is a different beast. It superficially looks like Greenaway. It works within a rich allegorical structure, has layered annotations, fine acting and casual nudity. But it is missing a key element, the one thing that characterizes Greenaway for me. So I suspect that this really a Tom Phillips film.What we have here: Fine actors read lines of the epic poem. Directly relevant images are shown by way of obvious illustration. Frequent windows pop up with head shots of experts who provide explanatory footnotes. Everything points internally. It is hard to see how this is superior to reading an annotated text. What we don't have here: Greenaway's work is characterized by various mixes of: a fascination with overlapping ordering frameworks (numbers, games, cosmologies, taxonomies); abstruse external references from those frameworks used allegorically; layering of images to these references -- in recent years simultaneously; lush scenes and compositions which refer to famous paintings; and regressing layers of self-reference and self-parody including references to his other films. Everything points externally.You get none of that here. It is all internal.
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