The Belly of an Architect **** (1987, Brian Dennehy, Chloe Webb, Lambert Wilson) – Classic Movie Review 10,643

A fictional Chicago architect called Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy), working on a project in Rome, Italy, an exhibition in tribute to visionary real-life French neoclassical architect Etienne-Louis Boullée (1728-99), discovers that everything is crumbling around him.

Stourley Kracklite (Dennehy) is afflicted by stomach cramps that may be cancer and fears that his pregnant much younger wife Louisa Kracklite (Chloe Webb) may be having an affair with his colleague, creepy charmer Caspasian Speckler (Lambert Wilson), the younger co-organiser of the Boullée project who is creaming off exhibition cash to restore the Fascist Foro Italico stadium. Kracklite is seduced by Caspasian’s photographer sister Flavia (Stefania Casini).

Stourley obsesses on the first Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, whose wife Livia supposedly poisoned him, and starts to suspect Louisa is trying to do the same to him. Louisa reveals that she is pregnant, her child with Kracklite conceived at the moment their train crossed the Italian border.

Writer-director Peter Greenaway’s brilliantly clever, gloomy and enigmatic 1987 art film The Belly of an Architect is overflowing with his usual bravura visual stylistics, pyrotechnic camerawork (Sacha Vierny) and teasing, witty, learned ideas about art and architecture, and Isaac Newton. Spanning nine months, and lasting two hours, it is a chronicle of life – spanning birth, creation, pain, loss and death.

If Vierny’s alienation images are astounding, Flemish Belgian composer Wim Mertens’s minimalist score is also outstanding.

But ironically what places it among Greenaway’s best work is the human dimension of Dennehy’s outstandingly warm and vital performance, towering over the film, even though he is dwarfed by the Roman monuments such as the Pantheon, the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Victor Emmanuel II Monument, the fountains of Piazza Navona and Hadrian’s Villa.

Also in the cast are Sergio Fantoni as Io Speckler, Vanni Corbellini as Frederico, Alfredo Varelli as Julio, Geoffrey Copleston as Caspetti, Francesco Carnelutti as Pastarri, Marino Masé as Trettorio, Marne Maitland as Battistino, Claudio Spadaro as Mori, Rate Furlan as Violinist, Julian Jenkins as Old Doctor, and Enrica Maria Scrivano as Mother.

RIP iconic actor Brian Dennehy, who died on 15 April 2020, aged 81.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,643

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