Baby of Macon

A real curiousity
Director Peter Greenaway, no stranger to making films with an OTT content made this - The Baby Of Macon in 1994. It was slammed by many critics for being too OTT (even by Greenaway's standards) and indeed many of the audience who did show up to watch it, tended to walk out in disgust at some of the sequences. The film faded quietly away in cinemas and its subsequent releases on both vhs and dvd tended to do the same... That is a shame because while the film has its flaws, it has strengths which propel it into 4 star territory.

The film is of the recreation of a stage play put on for a bloated aristocrat. The play is about the lurid events that happened in the French town of Macon during Medieval times. However, reality and what is being played blur and soon the audience find themselves participants in the events which become increasingly (and at times disgustingly) real.
The story sees a hideously overweight and ageing woman give birth to a beautiful baby. The...

Greenaway's Incredible Vision...
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Greenaway's Incredible Vision...

If one can imagine a moving fusion-synthesis of Van Eyck's Ghent Polyptych with Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 and Sade's Misfortunes of Virtue, stretched to a mind-bending cinematographic time-scale, then ye may have some idea of Peter Greenaway's Baby of M