The Baby of Mâcon (Peter Greenaway)

[McCrutchy]

As yet unavailable on home video in the United States of America, Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Mâcon (1993) is set to be released in Sweden on August 18th by Atlantic Film.

The Baby of Mâcon Blu-ray

Stephen Holden (The New York Times; 1997)

Not even Ken Russell could have dreamed up the stew of grotesque religiosity, slavering voyeurism and sexual violence that is Peter Greenaway's 1993 movie, ''The Baby of Macon,'' the English director's only feature film not to have been distributed in the United States. This elaborate play within a play within a play, in which the audience and the actors become thoroughly confused, stars Julia Ormond and Ralph Fiennes, who are both shown in full frontal nudity in a blasphemous scene parodying the birth of Jesus in a manger.

Set in the court of the Medici family in 1657 when famine and pestilence have rendered all the women in the region sterile, the movie follows the mass hysteria that erupts when a repulsive crone miraculously gives birth to a beautiful baby boy, who immediately becomes an object of worship.


The boy's demonic older sister (Ms. Ormond) perpetrates a fraud in which she claims to be the child's virgin mother. She invites the bishop's son (Mr. Fiennes) to perpetuate the hoax by playing Joseph to her Virgin Mary. But when the miracle child dies after his bodily fluids are auctioned off, the church turns against the fraudulent mother and sentences her to be gang-raped by 113 soldiers.

This relentlessly grim fable of exploitation, religious fanaticism and oppression is an ornate, social nightmare with contemporary echoes that take in everything from modern faith healing to advertising to pop culture deities like Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. And the fate of Ms. Ormond's character inevitably conjures up visions of the organized rapes in the Balkans carried out in the name of ''ethnic cleansing.''