Peter Greenaway is among the great image-makers in film. Still, many are put off by his strict mise en scene or refusal to place the human experience at the narrative’s center, but narrative is for novelists, so what are they griping about? Cinema is image after all.
And it is with an entirely unexpected image that Saskia Boddeke opens “The Greenaway Alphabet.” A close-up of Peter Greenaway receiving a haircut. It is immediately humanizing and grounding. He looks up as someone enters the room — we learn it is their daughter Pip — with the softest of welcoming eyes that almost look just a little touched by embarrassment that this grooming is happening before the camera. Boddeke’s choice artfully snips away any expectations that this will ultimately be a “Greenaway” film — rectilinear, systematic — and suggests we may get an altogether new perspective of the person.
And we do, but there’s more. The A-Z alphabet lends a familiar Greenaway structure to what are a mix of casual home exchanges and formally arranged scenes between father and daughter talking about family, art, being a human and finding one’s way. Pip is in her teens and Greenaway in his mid-seventies. It’s not so much the what of their exchanges that are the heart of the film but the how: warm, tender, gentle, funny, kind, impatient — both Pip and Boddeke take him to task a few times. What is clear is that mother and daughter are actively trying to understand what makes husband and father tick. We live together as families and still parts of us remain strange to the others.
There is much love here and it’s touching. So much so I watched it again the following day.
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