The Baby of Mâcon (1993, Peter Greenaway) (Patreon)

48/100

A film I'd actively dreaded for nearly 30 years, based entirely on one friend's description (via email). I don't even recall whether he specified what happens—if so, I forgot the details at some point. Merely remembered having been told that the film concludes with something excruciatingly horrific and almost unendurably prolonged. Knowing Greenaway and his temperament, I was in no particular hurry to have that experience, and Baby of Mâcon's failure to get a NYC theatrical release allowed me to postpone it indefinitely. At the same time, though, I've always been curious, since I'm generally an admirer of Greenaway's work and have seen all of his other features ca. 1980-2003 (excepting the documentary Stairs 1 Geneva and that one Tulse Luper adjunct thing, Antwerp).

And for a good long while, this is just straightforward Greenaway, with the camera creeping methodically past a colorful orgy of set and costume design as a few key actors wax alternately vitriolic and cod-philosophical. I would argue that he doesn't do a great job of establishing narrative context here, in large part because it's quite hard (by design) to understand what Famine is saying, or even register that he's meant to be a purely allegorical figure—you need to be pretty familiar with medieval drama, and I'm probably at best vaguely familiar. Still, the basics aren't difficult to parse, and I'm always up for a portrait of vicious opportunism preying upon ignorant superstition. Especially when it's inflected with Greenaway's trademark visual pageantry and structural repetition, so that we get e.g. an itemized list of the baby's raiments and their worth, culminating in the hilariously pompous summary (re: a symbolic necklace made of cheap glass) "Value: valueless."  I of course also knew that Baby of Mâcon stars the then-unknown (or barely known, at least; certainly I'd not yet heard of either ca. May '93) Julia Ormond and Ralph Fiennes, and was surprised to discover that it's the former, not the latter, who looks like an obvious star in the making (until...well, anyway). Having skipped the Sabrina remake and Legends of the Fall and First Knight and etc., I had a low-ish opinion of Ormond formed almost exclusively from her embodiment of the title character in Smilla's Sense of Snow (which I was assigned to review by Entertainment Weekly, otherwise I'd have skipped that, too), but she does a superb job here of blending impish and noxious, creating a detestable young woman who nonetheless earns our grudging respect simply by virtue of being smarter and arguably less awful than everyone around her. The play-within-the-film's fixation on female virginity, while period-accurate, makes me cringe too much for a wholehearted embrace, and Greenaway's formal inventiveness remains at low tide. Still, had I attended Cannes '93, absent any foreknowledge, I'd likely have been mildly enthused up to at least the midpoint.

Here in late 2022, on the other hand, I was still very much aware that some sort of endless nightmare awaited me. All the same, I'd started to relax a bit, untense my shoulder muscles. Reason being: Greenaway underlines The Baby of Mâcon's present-tense theatricality throughout, constantly cutting to reaction shots of the onscreen audience and occasionally having "actors" (second level, i.e. the unnamed woman who plays The Daughter, as opposed to Julia Ormond, who plays the unnamed woman who plays The Daughter) break character in order to discuss the play in progress. A potentially tough-to-stomach scene like The Daughter descending to check in on her captive parents (and the sexual slave she gifted to Dad) features the distancing device of their bedroom prison being a nifty piece of rotating stagecraft that we see assembled in real time. The more emphasis this aspect received, the less anxious I became about whatever might be coming at the end—it'd likely be unpleasant, but it would also clearly be "fake," above and beyond the extent to which everything that happens in a fictional narrative qualifies as fake. An additional layer of artifice protected me from full emotional engagement. Violence would be unusually easy to shrug off. 

If you've seen The Baby of Mâcon, you know where this is going. (If you haven't, and think you might want to down the road, best to bail now, as there's no way for me to dig into my complicated reaction without revealing what happens.) Whether Greenaway intended to lull viewers into a false sense of security, I have no idea—probably not, as that depends upon one's having heard advance scuttlebutt about the ending. But that ending was, in theory, a sickening gut punch for me, since the horror I'd feared is expressly not "fake" within the film's diegesis. It's not just The Daughter who gets brutally raped to death by 208 men in succession; it's also the unnamed woman who plays The Daughter and naturally assumed that she'd be issuing phony screams of pain and anguish from behind a curtain. Not since Funny Games' Paul literally rewound the movie to undo a cathartic moment of triumph for the innocent victims with whom we identify have I felt so sadistically fucked with. Did I mention that I love both versions of Funny Games, even though it took me eight years to work up enough nerve to sit through the original a second time? In theory, this sort of grotesque meta-intellectual gamesmanship is very much my jam.

That's twice now that I've typed and italicized the words in theory, though, and it's because Greenaway's pivot doesn't actually work for me, either viscerally or conceptually. The former took me by surprise: Despite recognizing that I should have a much harder time sitting through the gang rape sequence (especially given that nothing bothers me more onscreen than does audible suffering), I wound up having more or less the same detached reaction that I'd anticipated having. It was too late, turned out—I'd spent so much of the film conscious of the play-within-the-film's non-reality that I just sort of automatically shifted that consciousness up a layer, and was soothed by the knowledge that Julia Ormond was in fact issuing phony screams of pain and anguish from behind a curtain. Mind you, it's still not what I'd call fun...though note that Greenaway employs the tools of cinema to skip past approximately 189 of the 208 rapists, letting us off the hook to a large degree. (Also, the apparent corpse, at play's end, of the man who plays The Bishop's Son, wheeled out alongside the dead woman who plays The Daughter, only confuses matters. So the bull genuinely gored him to death? And the woman who plays The Daughter, along with everyone else, just rolled with that? Or are we meant to believe that they didn't know it was unsimulated? Seems to me that having Fiennes' character show up alive for the curtain call would have been far more chilling.) Mostly, though, this whole meta-exercise seems utterly divorced from what had previously been the film's ostensible text. What Haneke does to the viewer of Funny Games has a clear, thought-provoking corollary in what its two intruders do to the family. How trashing our implicit compact with this movie, by inflicting "actual" over-the-top violence upon one of the morality play's actors, relates to her character's ugly exploitation and eventual act of infanticide, on the other hand, I really have no idea. Having witnessed and begun an effort at digesting that, what are we supposed to think of the village's panicked dismemberment of the baby? (Remember the baby?)

My admittedly quick and superficial effort to find answers in other reviews proved fruitless. Most people seem to either adore or truly despise this sucker, and it feels weird to allot such a wishy-washy, middle-of-the-road rating. I was marginally more repelled than I was fascinated, though, so there you have it. At least it's not looming over me like a promise of future agony anymore.