Eisenstein in Guanajuato, opening Friday at the Roxie, is an ambitious, highly stylized, fictionalized dramatization of the legendary Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's strange sojourn south of America's border into Mexico. About 50 minutes into the film, British filmmaker Peter Greenaway imagines his often misunderstood, frequently persecuted subject submitting, with some protestations, to a night of anal congress with his slim young Mexican guide. The elfin 30-something Mexican insists that Eisenstein's creative worries must be vigorously addressed in the bedroom.
Guide: "You have left it a little late, Sergei. But it doesn't matter. Better late than never."
Segei Eisenstein: "Better never late."
"You are far from home and off your home initiation route."
"I cannot."
"Cannot what, why not?"
"Because I've argued with myself repeatedly that this cannot be the way. I have reached my accustomed point, and this is where I stop."
"It used to be where you stopped, it isn't any longer."
"This is where I get off the train."
"Sorry, no station."
"Then I will have to jump."
"Jumping off from a moving train could be dangerous, and your prick tells you: You have a first-class ticket to continue the journey."
"My prick is a stowaway, an even sadder clown than me. He wears a clown's helmet."
"He is a wiser clown than you. Follow where he leads. And if you won't lead, let me. I am the guide. I will be at the back of the train."
The London-born Greenaway, never the most prolific of film artists, returns after a long absence with a mature if frisky work, his own unique perspective on the long exile of the queer Russian cinema genius, here depicted in 1931 attempting to film in Mexico. Just as Eisenstein's creative life was misunderstood; just as he fled one set of masters �" the fathers of the Russian Revolution, ultimately Uncle Joe Stalin, a truly severe critic whose opinions were delivered with severe prejudice; just as he would flirt with and ultimately be spurned by Hollywood's immigrant moguls, themselves not sufficiently removed from Mother Russia or Uncle Joe; just as his most memorable work would be criticized as either too timid or too subversive by tastemakers on several continents; our long neglected queer hero Eisenstein has finally found a sensibility that lets him be himself: queer, frizzy-haired, Jewish, pranky, and forever fleeing for more hospitable climes and sponsors.
Back to the bedchamber. As Eisenstein lets himself be mounted by his diminutive young guide, he discovers the peculiar mix of stabbing pain and guilty pleasure that this profound act often brings. Director Greenaway turns the bedroom into a stage in which pleasure comes disguised as both pain and perhaps a premonition of his own early death (Eisenstein would succumb to a heart attack in 1948).
Eisenstein: "Oh it hurts, I'm going to vomit!"
Guide: "That's what every virgin must say. That's what the virgin of the New World said."
"I'm bleeding!"
"So you are."
"Bleeding makes me vulnerable!"
"It does, but you have no reason to feel concerned unless you're a hemophiliac. You're not a member of the Russian Royal Family, are you? Are you a Romanov? Europe gave Mexico many things, and perhaps Mexico gave only one thing back: [a stage whisper] Syphilis! It was long known as a Spanish disease, then the Spanish gave it to the French. Then it was known as a French disease. The French soldiers took it back to France, and it was everybody's!"
With its witty montage, explicit bouts of homo-fucking staged as if in a boxing ring, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is a queer feast for all the senses. It's a film that demands that we open ourselves up to receive pleasure, pain and everything else the cinema gods have deemed suitable for a truly non-sentimental education.
Eisenstein in Guanajuato joins Greenaway's misunderstood, underappreciated 1989 masterpiece The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover as a high-risk adult meal that engages all our senses as fully as the acts in its bedroom set-piece. The 35-year-old Finnish actor-filmmaker Elmer Back is a jovial, fleshy delight as Eisenstein in full mid-life crisis mode. Mexican-born actor-theatre artist Luis Alberti is an impish pleasure as Eisenstein's guide/tormentor. Alberti's theatrical background greatly contributes to Greenaway's vision of Eisenstein as a man whose life was its own tormented art. I rank Eisenstein right up there with the very best of Peter Greenaway's unique cinema, including 1987's Belly of an Architect and his startlingly unconventional 1991 take on Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero's Books.