In the Flesh: The Baby of Mâcon

Here is a play: actors mill on a crowded stage while a crowd of nobles in the court of Cosimo de’ Medici III looks on, applauding and calling out responses to the players’ prompts. An aging, disease-stricken woman gives birth to a golden-haired babe (smuggled onstage under cover of cloaks and skirts) to break the curse of childlessness which has lain on Mâcon for years. Curtains lift and we move deeper in, watching as though reading scenes in a tapestry as the child is arrayed piece by piece in finery and relics, as his elder sister (Julia Ormond) claims him for her own, as he becomes first a symbol of the town’s miraculous restoration and then a transparent instrument for his sister’s crass ambitions. With each new scene Peter Greenaway draws us deeper into the fiction of The Baby of Mâcon, parting velvet draperies onto impossible spaces, tunneling further and further into a dramatic structure which can only exist at the intersection of film and theater, something which combines the pageantry of Victorian London’s posed scenarios and the riotous, vulgar clamor of bear baiting.

Every frame of Greenaway’s film might, if frozen, pass easily for an oil painting of some religious observance in 17th century France. Every costume is just short of lurid, the print’s reds so saturated as to be almost eye-watering, its whites dazzling in their purity, the flesh of the performers by turns rosy, clammy, ruddy, waxen in accordance with the fabrics draping it. So, here is a child: flaxen curls and somber face and small, soft finger pointing in ferocious divine judgment. His family upends and inverts itself at his arrival, parents sealed beneath the earth, daughter reigning as his mother, claiming herself Mary’s virginal successor. The world blooms again, but from a sterile miracle. His sole act of godlike exercise is one of censorious cruelty. Horns. Snorting breath. A young priest’s (Ralph Fiennes) naked body covered in blood and twitching in the straw. The rest is all the drama of the marketplace, lymph and blood and urine sold to relic-seekers by church grandees, blessings doled out by his tiny hand in exchange for rich favors from those who can least afford them.

Here is the sister imprisoned for infanticide and thrown behind a curtain to play-act at being raped so that the church can hang her legally, her virginity no longer any obstacle. The fiction snaps like matchwood as an actor tells her that no one will know she isn’t acting, as first he and then his hundreds of fellow players queue, receive their blessing, and march in to deflower her again, again, again until her frantic screams grow hoarse and fade and then cease altogether. Where does the play end and the suffering begin? This, after all, is only a flourish aimed not at Cosimo and his courtiers but at us, to whom even the nobles bow at the film’s close. We are entrusted with this awful thing and left to wonder at the truth of it, at the precise level of fiction at which the blood smearing the girl’s thighs as she lies motionless on a bier exists. Where did it happen and where didn’t it, and how ought we to feel about each layer of its reality and unreality? Greenaway has no answer, only the whole black and rotted onion cut in half so that we all might take a long, long look at what its innards hold.