What a noxious little dish this is, served up with all the trimmings of Greenaway's apparently constant dislike of women, (first detected in THE DRAUGHTSMAN'S CONTRACT but overlooked by the politically correct as it posed as an `art' film), his `operatic' sense of self-importance, ideas lifted from other movies, (the changing dress colour previously happened in ORPHÉE in the late 40s!), and the somewhat infantile notion that `daring' and `shock' are somehow synonymous with `genius' or `profundity'. A squalid, sordid little opus that really tells us little more than the fact that some people find cruelty entertaining, and middle-class `intellectuals' still get a charge out of slumming. Monotonous, dreary, shallow and pretentious.
