Goltzius And The Pelican Company (18)

Directed by Peter Greenaway

3/5

BAFTA award-winning director Peter Greenaway shows he has not lost his controversial touch in this visually arresting film, a stimulus the mind and senses.

It tells the story of the  celebrated 16th-century Dutch printer, painter and engraver Hendrik Goltzius’s trip in 1590 to Colmar in Alsace to find finance for his printmaking business in The Hague. 

In the film he persuades the local governor, the Margrave of Alsace
(F Murray Abraham), to pay for the production of a limited deluxe edition of the Old Testament with an erotic twist. 

Goltzius (Ramsey Nasr,  the former Dutch Poet Laureate) does so by agreeing that his company of printers and actors will entertain the margrave by re-enacting six biblical stories covering the sexual taboos of voyeurism, incest, adultery, paedophilia, prostitution and necrophilia. 

Being Greenaway, little is left to the imagination. The plays are sexually explicit with both men and women appearing equally naked throughout — which makes a change. 

Each scene is exquisitely framed like an Old Master and, in hallmark Greenaway fashion, many are shot in boxes within boxes. 

The painter-turned-director uses words and calligraphy once more to punctuate the narrative — an occasionally distracting device — as Goltzius acts as narrator as well as protagonist. He provides an art lesson too as he compares the different artistic depictions of the characters in each tale. 

Yet his intricate wordplay seems a device for him to lord it over the audience — he, and the film, are a little too clever by half. 

Even so, the film has its moments. As the Alsatian court and the Dutch company argue politics and religion, the margrave’s hypocritical liberal stance is unmasked and he starts torturing and killing those who disagree with him. 

Goltzius And The Pelican Company may not be as disturbing or shocking as the director’s earlier The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.

But the endless nudity and sexual exploits — bordering on the pornographic — are set in a religious context which may well divide opinion. 

At just over two hours long, the film’s something of an endurance test as Greenaway pummels away  at the senses.

But it does prove two things — the director is a visual master craftsman but he is too very much an acquired taste.