Watching a Peter Greenaway movie is like sitting down to a haute-cuisine banquet where they never stop bringing out the food: Your taste buds are delighted, then sated, then numbed, and, finally, crushed. You might even want to look for a vomitorium; more tenderhearted viewers of Greenaway’s biggest hit, “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover” (1989), probably did. The writer-director hasn’t been seen much in these parts since the turn of the millennium, but he has been steadily working in Europe, and his latest eye-boggling confabulation, “Eisenstein in Guanajuato,” pops into the Brattle this week. At 73, the old provocateur has changed little, and the new film is yet another dazzling surfeit of lampreys.
Some background: Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) was the great Soviet hope of silent cinema, the director of “Battleship Potemkin” (1925) and “October: Ten Days That Shook the World” (1928), films that pioneered the use of montage (i.e., editing) for maximum narrative/propagandistic impact. In 1930, Eisenstein traveled to Mexico to make a film with the backing of US writer and radical Upton Sinclair; he hung out with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, shot miles of film, lost control of the project, and was forced by Mexican authorities and money woes to leave the country.
Greenaway’s film uses this as the backdrop for a ribald, visually rapturous fantasia on sex, death, cinema, and folly. “Eisenstein in Guanajuato,” like all this director’s work since 1982’s “The Draughtsman’s Contract,” is as much an art installation as a movie, with most of the action unfolding on immense, lavishly designed sets across which the camera sweeps as though panning across two-dimensional tableaux. Every so often, the film steps outside to take in the breathtaking grandeur of the Mexican landscapes; the cinematographer, Reinier van Brummelen, deserves some kind of combat pay.
Eisenstein is played by the Finnish actor Elmer Bäck as a cosmic clown, an uptight genius whose body issues and frizzy hair position him on a continuum between Eraserhead and Barton Fink. “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” is less concerned with moviemaking than with its dour Soviet hero giving in to his sensual urges in the heat of the New World. In particular, that means being seduced by his guide, the elegant academician Palomino Canedo (Luis Alberti), who’s happily married but isn’t above showing Sergei what the locals do during their siestas.
This being Greenaway, the focus is equally on haute production values and gleefully depicted bodily functions: vomit, excrement, explicit arousals, graphic Mexican-on-Russian sexual congress. “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” is an orgy of visuals intended to simultaneously delight and offend, the screen splitting in two, three, six, eight; history lessons popping up in various corners of the screen; the camera tracking in circles and lines, extreme fish-eye lenses attempting to swallow the sets whole.
A lot of this is naughty, overproduced egghead fun, and the scenes between Eisenstein and Canedo simmer with sexual tension. But too much is never enough for Greenaway, and while the leading men give bravura performances, the supporting cast is weak — Lisa Owen as Mrs. Upton Sinclair is actively dreadful — and the film’s hyperactivity ultimately wears you down. Is it possible to give a movie Ritalin? “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” makes you want to try.
Note: The movie that was taken out of Eisenstein’s hands in 1931 was reconstructed according to his notes in 1979 and can be streamed on Amazon Prime and other outlets. If you’re going to see Greenaway’s film, do yourself and Eisenstein the respect of seeing “Qué Viva Mexico” as well.
★ ★ ½
EISENSTEIN IN GUANAJUATO
Directed and written by Peter Greenaway. Starring Elmer Bäck, Luis Alberti, Lisa Owen. At the Brattle. 105 minutes. Unrated (as NC-17: graphic nudity and sex, language). In Russian, English, and Spanish, with subtitles.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.