SOURCE: Falcon, Richard. Review of 8[frac12] Women, by Peter Greenaway. Sight and Sound 10, no. 1 (January 2000): 48–49.

In the following review, Falcon offers a negative assessment of 8[frac12 Women, arguing that the film is limited by Greenaway's self-referential style.]

8[frac12] Women sets out its organising principles in the title while the director Peter Greenaway offers in the press notes his customary auto-exegesis for baffled critics, explaining that the film is constructed around an intentionally comic parade of eight and a half archetypes of male sexual fantasy, as represented in western art practice down the ages. For each figure, a list of artists could be matched. Griselda's chaste nun in starched linen? Try Rembrandt, Diderot and de Sade. The Madame Butterfly syndrome of the oriental female used and abandoned by a western male? How about Delacroix, Ingres, Flaubert and Matisse? It is also intended as a comic (a word not readily...