Alone with his daughter (I. Pasco) on an island inhabited by spirits that he has put at his service with magical arts, Prospero (J. Gielgud), the deposed Duke of Milan, raises a storm that causes his enemies to shipwreck, but magnanimously renounces revenge. P. Greenaway manipulates Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611-12) at his pleasure, which for him too is the great Renaissance tragedy of lost illusions. Without counting the interpolations in the 24 books that collect all the knowledge of the time, nourishing Prospero's magical power, the text is reduced to less than a third. Excluding Gielgud who gives voice (that of Gianni Musy in Italian) to all the characters, it is a film without acting actors, staged as an allegorical court show, proliferating in images and figures that, evoked by the words, compose, change and recompose themselves. It is a wonderful film also in the sense of a film about the wonderful, the richest and most visually complex of Greenaway who used the most sophisticated Japanese technology for electronic high definition. In a redundant triumph of Renaissance art that through the Baroque arrives at a delirious Rococo, he made an operation of total art where the technical means of film and electronic tape absorb music, theater, dance, pantomime, singing, drawing, sculpture, painting, graphics, animation, collage, circus. If you do not accept the rules of his game (taste for excess, grotesque dilation, metacinematographic dimension, anti-naturalistic acting, etc.), the film turns into a visit to an ancient museum whose catalog has been lost.
(il Morandini)
There are twenty-four books that Prospero, a character from William Shakespeare's The Tempest, brought to the island where he was confined. They gather all human knowledge and serve as a metaphor for Greenaway to build his film which, instead of being composed of shots, is, as usual, divided into pictures. The baroque and the grotesque here reach heights that sometimes leave you embarrassed. Taking his method to the extreme, we move from underwater scenes to strange ballets with minimal movements. The painting he was inspired by this time is that of Tiziano Vecellio, so nudes everywhere and not necessarily well modeled. Those who know Shakespeare's work will be able to appreciate the operation. The others probably won't be able to stand John Gielgud's long monologue. Michael Nyman's music is splendid, enriched this time also by the participation of excellent singers, first of all Ute Lemper.
(il Farinotti)
The critics
“Cartellone a film that praises the president of the Biennale, the Portuguese architect, the competition sings the glory of cinema with the new work of the priceless Englishman Peter Greenaway: that Prospero's books (in Italy it will be called The Last Tempest), minimally anticipated months ago by Cannes, which leaves, to say the least, speechless. Coming precisely from Shakespeare's The Tempest, the film supposes that it is its own protagonist who tells what happened, and nevertheless happens, on the island where the Duke of Milan is confined, ousted by his brother Antonio who allied himself with the King of Naples. Provided by his faithful servant Gonzalo with twenty-four books covering all knowledge, Prospero uses his magical powers to invent memory and simulate reality: to recall how he arrived in that remote land with his daughter Miranda, defeated the witch Sycorax, subjugated the monster Caliban, freed the spirit Aríel, and to unleash the storm that brings Antonio and the King of Naples to the island, shipwrecked. Having foiled the plot set up by Caliban, Prospero carries out his plan to regain the Duchy and marry Miranda to the son of the King of Naples. And when he has obtained what he wanted, he can renounce books and magic and forgive his enemies. At this point Prospero ceases to give voice, he alone, to all the characters. The invention is finished, and the last book destroyed will be the complete works of Shakespeare. We would be lying if we said that the narrative line proposed by Greenaway is all easily graspable. Anyone who does not remember the original text well risks getting lost in the film's leafy architecture, dominated by the figure and voice of John Gielgud and crossed by infinite figurative echoes, erudite references and wonders of illusionism. The great strength of Prospero's books is in fact in the astonishing staging, which repays the blurriness of the poetic center. It is in the way in which, making use of the photography of Sacha Vierny, the set designers Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs, the sublime music of Michael Nyman, but also of Japanese electronic technology, Greenaway blends magic and culture in a visionary full of eccentric perspectives. By combining the ancient obsession with numbers with the disenchanted passion of the bibliophile who knows how the knowledge provided by books provides a false reality, Greenaway manipulates our artistic heritage of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. (Prospero has the doge's horn, the Laurentian Library echoes in its rooms, classical mythology is exhumed in Renaissance forms) touching the peak of directorial wisdom. Ballet, court show, Greenaway's self-portrait for transposed Shakespeare and Gielgud - the powerful Sir John in his nineties - Prospero's books sins, if we want, for excess of richness with its disconcerting dizziness of sumptuous costumes, music, naked bodies, clouds of fire, witchcraft that brought to our days are expressed in the scenes in which inside the screen there is a second screen. But rarely, perhaps never, have the magnificent frauds of cinema helped us to remember that not only ourselves but cinema itself is the stuff of which dreams are made.”
Giovanni Grazzini (L’Indipendente, 7 September 1991)
