Que viva Eisenstein!

After the relative disappointment of "Goltzius" (was that made with any budget at all?) - this felt to me like a great return to form for Greenaway.

Clearly here he had enough money to put his talents for framing, colour and composition to great effect. Also, I thought that the two main characters were very well-cast and imbued the story with real depth; as did many of the supporting actors, such as Palomino's wife, and the bell-ringer (the only jarring note for me being the guy playing "Hunter" - who mostly seemed to be standing stiffly waiting for his next line...).

As others have noted, this is not the film you need if you want lots of "Eisenstein on set, directing" footage, but for me there was plenty of implied and explicit context regarding his standing in Russia, support in the USA and the point in his life he'd got to at the time. Well worth a viewing.

Ordinarily I can take Peter Greenaway or leave him alone -- chiefly the latter. But he really scores this time with a story that has longed to be told.

As is known Sergei Eisenstein hoped to work in Hollywood in the early thirties just as sound came in. But thanks to aright-wing campaign (plus its own lack of imagination) Paramount Pictures was scared off from making films of with of the scripts the great Russian director had written : an adaptation of Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" and an original historical drama "Sutter's Gold." The novelist Upton Sinclair stepped in and elected to back a film Eisenstein wanted to make about Mexico. But he knew nothing about film production and less about Eisenstein's highly improvisatory working methods. Under-budgeted and best by problems the shoot was brought to a halt when Sinclair's brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough discovered SME was having too much fun south of the border. Moreover he got a gander at the great man's cache of frankly gay pornographic drawings. Eisenstein not only never got to edit "Que Viva Mexico" -- he never even saw the rushes. He returned to Russia where he made "Alexander Nevsky" and "Ivam the Terrible" Sinclair meanwhile had the "Que Viva Mexico" footage sliced and diced into travelogues.

This is the backdrop of what Greenaway has done which s to present Eisenstein's Mexican sojourn as a sexual awakening. He falls madly in love (and lust) with a handsome guide. Greenaway brings the full bore of his visual imagination to telling this tale with multiple images and lighting the likes of which hasn't been seen since Sternberg. Elmer Back is superb as SME and Luis Alberti is equally great as his love interest. Not to be missed.

As the title indicates, this is a biopic inspired by the Mexican days of Soviet Union cinema vanguard Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), after his sortie into Hollywood proved to be futile, in 1930, he was assigned to make the ambitious but ultimately problematic project QUE VIVA MEXICO in Mexico (the whole ordeal is worthy of its own screen re-enactment), which Eisenstein would later relinquishes, a relatively intact version would only be released posthumously in 1979.

No one would expect Peter Greenaway's treatment to be strictly reverent, although now in his seventies, Greenaway has no hesitation of venturing into the prurient facet of Eisenstein's idiosyncrasy and abandon, preponderantly, the film is a two-hander between Sergei (Bäck) and his Mexican guide Palomino Cañedo (Alberti), to whom Sergei claims to lose his virginity. Sergei's homosexual initiation is explicitly explored in the palatial hotel room he stays, on that vast bed, the sex temple he shares with Palomino, and coins the first ten days in Guanajuato as "Ten Days that shook Eisenstein", a wordplay to his revolutionary pièce-de-résistence OCTOBER: TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD (1928).

Greenaway delights in magnifying Eisenstein's blunt self-reflection and directorial frustration (although it is mostly an interior piece that largely overlooks the filmmaker's onerous field work, excluding a visit to the Mummies of Guanajuato and the institution of the Day of the Dead celebration) through his larger-than-life approach which constitutes operatic ways of utterance, info-dumping sleight-of-hand where real-life footage is rapidly juxtaposed to counterpoint the references in a triptych split-screen, and majestic, but noticeably digitally airbrushed and light-inflected scenography, being put into great use in the flourishes of 360 degree twirling shots and seamlessly edited faux-long shots, etc., all is impressive on a grandiose scale, but also appreciably betrays an overreaching effort to reassure us that he is still at the top of his game.

Under the spotlight is Finnish actor Elmer Bäck's madcap impersonation of a ludic, unprepossessing Eisenstein, sporting a fuzzy, bouffant hairdo à la Einstein, and gives his all to Greenaway's undue caprices, which on the whole leaves the impression that Eisenstein is more hysterical than sympathetic, a clownish figure whose brilliance is very much elusive to moderately stunned audience, a typical case of miscast should be noted. Luis Alberti, by comparison, comes off less scathed owing to his more natural and unaffected "stud" role in the play.

By and large, Greenaway's self-reflexive, symphonically flamboyant opus can be construed as a nonconformist filmmaker's knowing salute to a free-spirited genius who constantly clashes with his times and whose legacy should be incessantly exhumed to meet new light and fresh air, and knock dead any number of spectators.

Going in to watch Eisenstein in Guanajuato , I was expecting the worst. I've long been a big fan of SOME of Peter Greenaway's works. The Baby of Macon, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, Drowning by Numbers , The Draughstsman's Contract are some of my favourite films of all time- exciting, provocative,daring,original, innovative, thought provoking and - surprisingly - fun. And his early shorts like 26 Bathrooms,Death on the Seine and A TV Dante are also very well worth seeking out and rewarding. But on the flip side, Greenaway has made a lot of disappointing blunders, culminating in the totally unwatchable Eight and a Half Women. The Pillow Book and Goltzius and the Pelican Company I would rate 5 out of 10 simply for the cinemetagrophay. Nightwatching merits a 6 out of 10 because it had at least a tiny bit of a plot.

Now as for as Eisenstein , Greenaway has finally resolved to exert some self discipline and to remind us that he is a director to be reckoned with. Eisenstein is an extremely profound emotional journey. At one level , it directly transplants you into the main character: it makes you see through the eyes of an innocent , abroad in a completely foreign, exotic land, i e. Through the eyes of Eisenstein. There are Day of the Dead parades, sun drenched , hugely coloufrul landscapes and , constantly hovering on the horizon , a vaguely ( and sometimes not so vaguely ) threatening atmosphere. Long story short, this is a historical/ psychoanalytical story that, despite all the odds, Peter Greenaway somehow turns into a riveting and entertaining picture.

I have not seen any of Greenaway's previous movies, and while I have seen Potemkin, I barley knew anything about (the actual) Eisenstein going in.

What I loved about this movie: The editing is fantastic. It plays around with the format, having real life photos of the characters and the locations next to characters as they are mentioned, playing with angles and positions of the characters, experimenting with colors, and obviously, using montages in a great way. I hope this is all based on Eisenstein's actual writings about the subject, as it is clear that he has thoughts about what movies can do with these tools.

That's the one positive thing I have to say about this movie. The characters are stylized into cartoon characters, and the dialog is boring and unengaging. The actual storyline is very forgettable. Greenaway chose to have the movie focus on Eisenstein's experiences in Mexico, but did not include any of the actual movie-making Eisenstein did there. To me, that would have been a more interesting movie - but I can understand that Greenaway had a different vision for this story.

The sexual scenes were graphical, but not grotesque or provoking (unless you are provoked by homosexuality).