MOVIE REVIEW : Dreams Razed in ‘The Belly of an Architect’

Like a jewel with a huge flaw, Peter Greenaway’s “The Belly of an Architect” (at the Nuart) simultaneously dazzles and disappoints. Made in 1986, and released now in the wake of the art-house success of “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,” it’s another of Greenaway’s comic-erotic parables about the artist’s nightmare: struggling to produce or celebrate something timeless and perfect, weighed down by the boils and lusts and excretions of the flesh.

Here, Greenaway gives us the deliciously named Stourley Kracklite, a seemingly sturdy, successful Chicago architect (played, superbly, by Brian Dennehy) who’s become obsessed with his opposite, a little-known visionary French architect named Etienne-Louis Boullee. Boullee, a real-life 18th-Century figure, designed magnificent buildings and tombs, mostly never built, for a city he never saw: Rome.

In the film, Kracklite comes to Rome at the behest of the Speckler family to curate an exhibition of Boullee’s drawings in the Victor Emmanuel Building, Italy’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Like the wealthy patrons of “The Draughtsman’s Contract,” the Specklers prove to be a poisonous, amoral lot: the aristocratic, unhelpfully remote father (Sergio Fantoni), the voyeuristic daughter (Stephania Cassini) and, especially, the cruel, voluptuary son, Caspasian (Lambert Wilson), who picks up sensual hints from the way Kracklite’s spouse, Louisa (Chloe Webb), eats cake and sets out to wrest both wife and exhibit away from him.

“The Belly of an Architect” is, in some ways, a construction of absolute paranoia. Just as Kracklite and the others are dwarfed in the vast, monumental Roman interiors--in compositions that deliberately recall the fixed perspective and classical balance of artists like Raphael, Vermeer, Piranesi or Canaletto--so art and life inexorably crush down Kracklite. From the moment he sets foot in Rome--at an elaborate reception staged in front of the Pantheon, with a cake molded in the shape of Boullee’s planned spherical tomb for Isaac Newton--he doubles over with stomach pains. The attacks get worse and worse. He becomes obsessed with bellies, his own and that of Augustus Caesar, who died from poisoned figs.

The image of a British 1 note with Newton’s picture, in the sugary ruins of the Newton cake, prefigures the way greed and disease will rot away Kracklite’s dreams. As his wife’s pregnancy grows--the movie begins with her moment of conception and ends with labor--Kracklite’s belly-obsession absorbs and destroys him. Around him, Greenaway, cinematographer Sacha Vierny and art designer Luciana Vedovelli provide an exquisite, sometimes darkly witty backdrop.

As Kracklite, Dennehy gives a wonderfully nimble performance, with a formidable exterior of sanity and health that gives Kracklite’s torment added poignancy. He has a virtuoso breakdown scene in the Pantheon Square, thrashing and wailing like a great drunken bear in pinpoint balance. But Webb’s role is like another layer of paint that chemically clashes with Dennehy’s, making a black smear. Her line readings reek with studied archness--as if she’d stumbled, against her will, into a Restoration-comedy soap opera in hell and was trying to punk-drawl her way loose.

The movie’s flaw encompasses more than Webb. As in “The Draughtsman’s Contract,” Greenaway seems to wallow in his artist-hero’s entrapment in evil, and that makes “Belly” something of a cul-de-sac, never rising out of its tomb of artificiality and self-reference.

There’s a pristine, art-obsessed formalism about Peter Greenaway’s films that seems to offend some critics, but that’s a pretty dubious response. “The Belly of an Architect” (rated R for sex and language) has flaws, smudges and intense pleasures. Something like a clockwork orange, it’s an art machine that spurts juice and acid.