The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story

Review by Lee Shoquist

for Reel Movie Critic

Directed by Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway, one of modern cinema's most innovative and daring directors, takes on the Herculean task of re-inventing cinema for the next century with his new project, "The Tulse Luper Suitcases." It's an overwhelmingly ambitious idea - to create a multimedia experience containing three feature films, a television series, an encyclopedia website, complete books and 92 DVDS. The press notes for the entire experience explain the story as such:

"…It chronicles the life of a roguish autodidact, Tulse Luper. An adventurer, writer, `project maker,' professional prisoner and finder of lost things, Luper traverses several continents, 16 prisons (literal and metaphorical), and 60 years of the Atomic Age, from the discovery of Uranium in 1928 to the Cold War's swan song, the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Ultimately the subject of symposia and exhibitions, his fascinating mysterious story, and indeed part of the 20th century's story, is reconstructed from the evidence found in 92 (the atomic number of uranium) suitcases strewn about the globe in his wake..."

"The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story," traces Luper's (JJ Field) early life from South Wales to Utah, and covers 21 suitcases, ending after World War II.

"Tulse Luper" is Peter Greenaway's latest and most obvious attempt to shell-shock the audience with the notion that filmmaking itself is complete artifice (we all know that anyway), and any attempt to lure the viewer into a traditional (or any) narrative is for naught. The very idea of seeing a movie, as Greenaway stated post-screening, "is completely artificial."

This idea, of course, is nothing too profound and, Greenaway, with the disastrous "8 1/2 Women" and now "Tulse Luper," has begun to move radically away from what once made him a fascinating filmmaker with the most acutely realized visual mastery (courtesy of the great Sacha Vierney). He told stories that had dizzying, complex and captivating themes. He was always a technical master and his signature obsessions - sex, nudity, food, violence and numbers - are intact in "Tulsa Leper" as well. But something critical is missing.

Now Greenaway has moved so much into the aesthetic experience of seeing a "film" - the endless superimpositions, dissolves, split screens, incorporations of mixed media, and general overall complete artifice - that the film is nothing but a sometimes impressive stunt. The filmmaker who once gave us "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," "Drowning by Numbers," "A Zed and Two Noughts" - is gone and has voluntarily replaced himself with an emperor who's quite aware he's wearing no clothes, and seems proud of it to boot.

Is Greenaway a fascinating filmmaker? …Still. Has Greenaway gotten exactly what he went after? No doubt about it. But was it worth getting? You tell me. Compelling stories are out the window. Richness of character has been discarded. Reaching the audience emotionally? Forget it. Good acting? No go. Heap after heap of cheap exaggeration in performance and trumped up "technique," it's here in spades. And the fascinating thing is that Greenaway actually prefers and desires it be that way.