Goltzius And The Pelican Company

Come year’s end, Strangers By The Lake will have some stiff competition for Most Erect Wangs thanks to this remarkably explicit dark dramedy, one which we can only describe as uniquely cinematically theatrical. If you found that vaguely oxymoron sentence to be confusing, Goltzius is here to confound.

A group of theater actors are trying to persuade The Margrave (F. Murray Abraham) to give them some funding so they afford a printing press and begin writing their more sexual adaptations of Bible stories. In return they will reside in his court for the next six nights, each night performing one of the stories they intend to write. On stage and in the flesh, love and lust are on the rise, both between the performers and the audience, as the actors become indistinguishable from their roles, and life begins imitating art a little too well.

As the company director and narrator to the audience – both in the movie and to us watching – Goltzius (Ramsey Nasr) seems to be the only one aware of the farcical nature of proceedings, while simultaneously giving some profoundly intelligent lectures on the sexual perversions within allegorical religious tales. Asking if media, be it theater back in the day or cinema and TV now, is the socially acceptable form of voyeurism, Goltzius (or perhaps more accurately, writer/director Peter Greenaway) gets his troupe to strip naked and bump uglies as often as possible, giving us all we take and then some.

Greenaway lessens the obvious theatricality of the movie by making us all too aware of the abandoned warehouse it’s been filmed in, along with unfinished special effects and an in-house orchestra to score the events as they happen. It’s all a bit of a sensory onslaught, both pummelling your brain with philosophical questions about storytelling and media, as well as the steady stream of naked flesh to keep your interest, ahem, piqued.

To be honest, after two hours plus, even the sex begins to wear thin, and the self-awareness of the tale gets a little too wink-wink-nudge-nudge-aren’t-we-clever towards the end. But when was the last time a movie managed to arouse both your brain as well as… certain other body parts? For that alone, Goltzius & The Pelican Company deserves a standing ovation.