Pack your bags for one long, painful journey.
Greenaway’s visionary project is quite unique, it challenges the conventions of film experience and is avant-garde in the way it uses a high-end technology to redefine how a viewer, who sits in a dark theatre communicates and interacts with a film, its characters, and the film’s story. While this film has some aesthetic qualities, it as an entity of on itself asks the viewer for too much of a commitment.
While some traditionalists are irritable about the recent trends of splitting films into two or three chapters they pale in comparison to this project. The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Episode 3. Antwerp goes slightly overboard, giving us a complete days worth of a story. Welcome to Peter Greenaway’s newest endeavor, a packaged compilation of films, DVDs, website, television, books and god knows what else. This multimedia orgy, which consists of a multi-layered, multi- suitcase, life story of a writer named Tulse Luper brings out the best and worst out of this European artist. You’ll be impressed by the sheer volume of the project if you are aware that it exists, but the elusiveness of Greenaway’s style tends to forget about the most important element…the audience.
Greenaway brings the sordid beauty found in his greatest success The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and adds the uneventful narrative as felt with his 8 ½ Woman. Trying to interpret his work and this film is an exercise in futility, however, there are many positives aspects in this feature such as the quality of high definition technologies which is groundbreaking and a mise en scene that contains many items of interest to look giving a sort of interactive videogame with plenty of Greenaway motifs to boggle the mind. The third installment offers a maze of characters that are identified by number and by strong, colorful and perverted personalities. The colors are mesmerizing just like the red of Deborah Harry’s lipstick and rain on the screen as never looked as good as this. What got on my nerves was Greenaway’s utilization of repetition, where both the audio and visual patterns play on this press on play, rewind and then play again idea. Watching this film is quite a challenge, the demands of grappling with his style; interpreting his work inside such an experiment is perhaps a suicidal proposition, unless you are a die-hard Greenaway fan.
For my first HD experience I can say that I am disappointed, not by the quality of the image which offers a crispness never to be found in regular 35mm celluloid but after watching two hours of images without meaning, and trying to figure out whether there is a narrative at all makes The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Episode 3. Antwerp the type of film which is far too demanding on the regular film viewer and makes you want to find the closest exist out unless you are one of the six German film viewers who will bother investing in this project.
