THE BABY OF MACON (Directed by Peter Greenaway. Starring Julia Ormond, Ralph Fiennes, Philip Stone, Jonathan Lacey)

Like the human flesh he roasted up in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Peter Greenaway is an acquired taste. Cannibals claim human meat is quite a delicacy, although first you have to get past the repugnant idea of consuming it. But repugnant ideas are Greenaway’s forte; his cinematic oeuvre embraces the parts of human existence other director’s wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. With scenes of castration, infanticide, gang rape and the almost ritual dismemberment of a child, The Baby Of Macon is certainly the director’s most unpleasant work. Which he would probably take as a compliment.

Set in the 17th century, the camera coolly observes (Greenaway never allows his cinematographers to actually get involved) a kind of reverse nativity play (the negativity?) that, as it progresses, takes on a hideous life of its own, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. An old crone (revealed in all her corpulent nudity) gives birth to a beautiful baby boy. Given that she is well past menopause, this is already a kind of miracle, but her teenage daughter claims something even more miraculous, announcing the child is her own, the result of a virgin birth. The church falls over itself to exploit this miracle, but the girl, in her hankering for a better life, is swept away in a tide of religious and secular forces beyond her control.

As ever, on an overcrowded screen in which everything is laid out with a deliberation that just about keeps chaos at bay, Greenaway simultaneously tackles a multitude of conceptual and visual ideas. The imagery expressly draws on Catholic iconography and renaissance art, underpinned with a host of obscure visual puns, while the merciless assault on superstition and religion also includes swipes at the exploitation of children, the role of women in a hierarchical state and, for ironic measure, the voyeurism of the audience.

The Baby Of Macon is already groaning under the weight of sacred cows being slaughtered by the time Greenaway brings on a sacred cow of his own to disembowel the would-be virgin’s lover. Never likely to be content with a simple act of rape, Greenaway lines up 208 soldiers to have sex with the naive Madonna (although fortunately, after the first two, we are merely asked to take 206 other offences into consideration). And his approach to child exploitation is enough to make even an old cynic like me long for the return of Shirley Temple.

Greenaway takes the artists prerogative of observing no limits, and I wouldn’t wish to apply any to him. Some of the best films this year have been the most brutal: Bad Lieutenant, Man Bites Dog, Reservoir Dogs. But this time Greenaway has clearly gone too far for his own good, with his film barely able to sustain itself even on the London art circuit. And it is hardly surprising. When so many films are maudlinly heart warming and intellectually undemanding it should be a relief to occasionally turn to a cold-hearted aesthete like Greenaway, but The Baby Of Macon is positively audience unfriendly.

Almost impenetrably multi-layered, it allows no room for even the most willing of viewers to relax and explore the film. There is always too much to digest and too little space in which to savour. There is no sympathetic character to allow any degree of identification, nor any great actor (Michael Gambon in The Thief, John Gielgud in Prospero) for us to revel in a dramatic display of villainy. It has little of the game playing wit of earlier films and marks a step back from the technical inventiveness of Prospero’s Books. In fact, with most of the characters portrayed as part of some kind of amateur dramatics society, the acting is actually deliberately bad. And it is all just so deeply, deeply unpleasant.

Yet, lest I make the mistake of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I have to confess my continuing admiration for this perverse film-maker. So confident is his authorial vision, so assuredly individual is his approach to the medium, and so multi-layered is his visual and conceptual sense that he can never be easily dismissed. There are gems in every one of his films, as likely buried in shit as in the sometimes overwhelming opulence with which he crowds the screen. And The Baby Of Macon is no exception, although it is exceptionally bleak. Beautifully lit and shot, determinedly nihilistic in its view of humanity, embracing the most problematic areas of both drama and existence, it aspires to a realm beyond film, and invites us to contemplate the very nature of cinema.

But the lasting impression is one of confusion. In an early scene, a Bishop peers under skirts of the self-proclaimed miracle mother to attempt to establish whether she is indeed a virgin. He emerges baffled, admitting “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for.” As a reviewer of this latest Greenaway opus, I know exactly how he feels.