The Baby of Mâcon ** (1993, Julia Ormond, Ralph Fiennes, Philip Stone, Jonathan Lacey, Don Henderson) – Classic Movie Review 10,650

Writer-director Peter Greenaway’s 1993 historical shocker The Baby of Mâcon is a fictional Middle Ages tale about an unexpected baby born to a grotesque woman way beyond child-bearing age is told as a three-act play in a provincial theatre in the 1650s in France in the court of Cosimo Medici, who, with his courtiers, watches actors perform the parable.

The baby is born in the town of Mâcon, whose inhabitants have been infertile for a generation. The child is exploited when the mother’s 18-year-old daughter (Julia Ormond) claims him to be her own by an immaculate conception. The supposed virgin birth is seized on and exploited by the Church, who sell the child’s bodily fluids as holy relics.

The Baby of Mâcon is a highly original, complex and difficult film packed with appallingly ugly and unpleasant images and incidents, though blessed by breathtakingly beautiful production design (Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs’s sets) and cinematography (Sacha Vierny). This is the same team as the one in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). The Costume Design is by Ellen Lens and Dien van Straalen.

It is queasy, claustrophobic, depressing, graphic, repellent, enormously intelligent and brilliantly filmic. It’s also very Peter Greenaway and that may just be enough.

Ralph Fiennes and Philip Stone also star as The Bishop’s Son and The Bishop, with Jonathan Lacey as Cosimo Medici. Also in the cast are Don Henderson, Celia Gregory, Jeff Nutall, Jessica Hynes [Jessica Stevenson], Anna Nieland, Frank Egerton and Graham Valentine.

The film premiered out of competition at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, but, with its many scenes of nudity and graphic violence, it struggled to find distribution and was not shown in the US until 1997.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,650

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