Product Details

• Format: NTSC
• DVD Release Date: December 21, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000A2WDVM
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #412,839 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A real curiousity, September 26, 2006

By 

D. I. Shipley "David Shipley" (KENT United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Baby of Macon (DVD)

Director Peter Greenaway, no stranger to making films with an OTT content made this - The Baby Of Macon in 1994. It was slammed by many critics for being too OTT (even by Greenaway's standards) and indeed many of the audience who did show up to watch it, tended to walk out in disgust at some of the sequences. The film faded quietly away in cinemas and its subsequent releases on both vhs and dvd tended to do the same... That is a shame because while the film has its flaws, it has strengths which propel it into 4 star territory.

The film is of the recreation of a stage play put on for a bloated aristocrat. The play is about the lurid events that happened in the French town of Macon during Medieval times. However, reality and what is being played blur and soon the audience find themselves participants in the events which become increasingly (and at times disgustingly) real.
The story sees a hideously overweight and ageing woman give birth to a beautiful baby. The townspeople are incredulous that this could happen which allows one of the woman's older daughters, a manipulative and scheming individual, played by Julia Ormond to claim that the baby is hers, and arrived via a divine conception. The child does seem to have powers of healing and blessing and as his guardian the young woman is soon on her way to making a fortune from payments from those eager to benefit from the child's seemingly divine powers. However, events later take a turn for the worse and the Church is shown in an unflattering light, as it makes an unpleasant intervention when things start to spin out of control. Indeed, Greenaway is essentially accusing the Church of being a self serving institution, more interested in the maintenance of power and control, rather than carrying out its historical mission.

Be warned the gore and sexual content is very strong indeed. The graphic sex scene between Ray Fiennes and Julia Ormond is then followed by the incredibly gruesome death of Fiennes' character.
Julia Ormond's character is sentenced to be raped by over 200 men by a vengeful Church official....
The child dies and is graphically dismembered on screen by the adoring townspeople as they each seek a 'relic' from his body.The net result of this OTT content is that it tends to dilute and blur the film's message rather than underline it though.
Gore aside, the film is sumptuous to look at and the costumes are an explosion of colour and detail. The film boasts a strong cast that includes Ray Fiennes, Julia Ormond, Don Henderson and others.

To sum up, watching The Baby of Macon is an experience, you could hardly call it entertainment. However, it remains a film that should be seen. The New Zealand dvd (which at the time of writing) is the only official dvd release, has been cut but is still very gruesome. If you wish to see the uncut version of the film, then pick up a UK release vhs. Just make sure that you have a strong stomach.....

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Incorrectly authored disc, June 30, 2011

By 

Mark S. "Mark S." - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Baby of Macon (DVD)

This DVD was authored incorrectly. It should be framed as a 2.35:1 anamorphic image, but instead is "squeezed" so that everything inside the frame is stretched vertically and looks taller, probably to a 1.85:1 image. If you have a dvd or blu-ray player that upconverts, you can finnagle the image and eliminate the problem, but people with regular dvd players don't have that option. The manufacturer needs to fix this. The film is visually stunning, and should be presented properly.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Greenaway's Incredible Vision..., June 7, 2011

By 

Sébastien Melmoth (Hôtel d'Alsace, PARIS) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Baby of Macon (The Baby of Mâcon) [Reg. 2] (DVD)

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Greenaway's Incredible Vision...

If one can imagine a moving fusion-synthesis of Van Eyck's Ghent Polyptych with Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 and Sade's Misfortunes of Virtue, stretched to a mind-bending cinematographic time-scale, then ye may have some idea of Peter Greenaway's Baby of Mâcon (1993).

Greenaway is a very curious artist who seemingly combines some type of obsessive drive with numeromania and a hatred of the body with hyperaesthesia, resulting in a cinema of compulsive fascination.

Tarrence Rafferty famously critiqued Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), shrewdly noting in part, `[Greenaway] obviously regards himself as an aesthetic virtuoso, but he's just a cultural omnivore. (He chews with his mouth open--we can identify almost every piece of art that has fed his imagination.) The only thing in this movie's hermetic universe that Greenaway is unable to control, or disguise with fancy brushwork, is his loathing of the body. What's offensive about the picture [is that] Greenaway is an intellectual bully: he pushes us to the ground and kicks art in our faces.'

This applies as well to virtually all Greenaway's work.

Greenaway's other great films include The Pillow Book (1996) and Prospero's Books (1991).
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Technical Notes: disc made in Sweden; excellent transfer 2.39:1 aspect ratio; PAL (which runs faster than NTSC) 117 mins. Appears UNCUT.
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