L'ultima tempesta

Prospero's Books is perhaps difficult to watch and requires some patience, but it doesn't deserve the dragging through the mud that it has received from some of these comments. The best way to approach this film is to just calm down and sit back and enjoy it on a psychedelic level. To question it too much is to miss the point. Also, I don't understand the focus on the nudity that many of the comments here have. Again, it's a matter of just making yourself comfortable with it, and moving on. This is a remarkable piece of work, and it needs to be approached with an understanding that it is simply very different from what most people are used to seeing. And thank goodness for that. To say that it is "the worst movie ever" or some such comment is incredibly unfair and a bit misguided.

Peter Greenaway is one of the great filmmakers, with an original and personal vision. This movie is a marvelous mixture of Shakespeare, visual poetry, music, art ... a feast for the imagination.

Having said that, I must add that I watched it with my wife whose succinct comment was "pretentious". Well, yes, it is a little pretentious, and there are spots that move along too slowly, so you can't just "let it happen" as you do with most movies. This one requires you to pay attention.

It includes what must be the longest single pan to the side ever filmed. I'm not sure how long it was, but it went on forever. I guess it must have gone more than 360 degrees, circled back to the original spot, where new sets had replaced the old. I'm not sure. But it is dazzling. Actually, you can take virtually any frame from this movie and make it into a poster.

Films have been around for about a century, and there isn't much around that doesn't recycle old material. Peter Greenaway is an exception. Like him or not, he's a dyed-in-the-wool original.

John Gielgud plays ex-Duke Prospero in Peter Greenaway's version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, stuck on an island with sprite, Ariel, monster servant Caliban and his beloved daughter Miranda, who falls in love with Prospero's enemy's son Ferdinand.

By and large, you either love or hate Greenaway who, as on this occasion, devotes his time to the film's visuals, somewhat at the expense of the emotions that the tale should bring. If you accept this though it is a rare treat. Greenaway's design for every second of this unique film experience is full of dance, colour, striking architecture, cinematic tricks and wonderfully choreographed movement (and an awful lot of nudity) topped off by Michael Nyman's music. It has oft been said that Greenway's films are like watching a moving renaissance painting and this is particularly the case here. Startling production to look at, if possibly a bit hard work at times.

This film is one of the very few examples of a cinema as a visual art and that is why it irritates so many people. It's very sad but one doesn't need a screen to follow 99,9 % of the movies made for the last one hundred years of the history of cinematography: you can simply broadcast them on radio. But this one belongs to 0,1 %(as well as Fellini's Otto e Mezzo, or Paradzhanov's Sayat Nova, for example) that you really have to WATCH. So try to perceive "Prospero's Books" not just as an illustrative material to some pieces of literature, but as an art exhibition in motion. Maybe that will make it easier for you, dear Hollywood junk viewer.

This is Peter Greenaway's most humane and enthralling feature, a visual tour-de-force which re-interprets Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' through the books of magic with which Prospero creates his realm. Sir John Gielgud gives a moving, heartfelt farewell performance in the title role, Michael Clarke is a sinuous, demonic Caliban, and Michael Nyman's score is fittingly triumphant. One sequence - the Masque - even turns the film into an opera.

Although the visuals are overloaded to a level of decadence rarely seen on film, it is always with a purpose. One quibble; Prospero's overlaying of his own voice on the characters makes some of the dialogue difficult to follow, especially if you are unfamiliar with the source material. The film demands to be seen on a wide screen.