Peter Greenaway’s playfully personal account of Sergei Eisenstein’s time shooting his uncompleted project ¡Que Viva México! is an uneven montage of arch cinematic ticks (triptych split-screens, monochrome/colour fades, circling cameras etc), sociopolitical satire, penetrated naked buttocks (Eisenstein declares that he is losing his virginity 14 years after Russia did the same), and cod-religious meditation upon the creative process. Elmer Bäck provides a crazy-haired symphony of babbling speeches as Eisenstein, the Russian maestro who went to Hollywood to hang out with Chaplin and wound up in Mexico after being turned away by the paranoid Paramount. At times the script drifts into Woody Allen territory (“sex and death – the two non-negotiables”), but it’s never quite as funny or stylistically insightful as it thinks. As the drama progresses, things become more self-absorbed; Eisenstein may get the title credit, but it’s Greenaway’s trademark baroque preoccupations that are the true focus of the film.
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