Eisenstein in Guanajuato

Director Peter Greenaway - a lifelong admirer of Sergei Eisenstein - mischievously opts to depict the revolutionary Russian film-maker at the most vulnerable point in his meteoric career, in this challenging treatise on art, faith, sexual identity and mortality. In Mexico in 1931 after a frustrating spell in Hollywood, Eisenstein (played by Finnish actor Elmer Bäck) is struggling to make Que Viva Mexico!, a film about the local cult of the dead. However, the 33-year-old gets a new burst of creative energy after he loses his virginity to academic-cum-guide Palomino Cañedo. Bäck excels as the troubled genius facing creative block and a crisis of confidence over whether his trademark montage style can survive the coming of the talkies, and bounds around the evocative sets with such vigour that cinematographer Reinier van Brummelen has to put his gliding camera into overdrive to keep up. As always with Greenaway, the dialogue tends towards the florid and the intellectual. Nevertheless, he remains a master image-maker and an irrepressible subversive.