General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

8½ Women (8 1/2の女たち)

8½ Women (8 1/2の女たち) is a 1999 comedy-drama film written and directed by Peter Greenaway, in which a widowed Geneva businessman and his son fill their household with eight and a half concubines after seeing Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963). It was screened in competition at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival and stars John Standing, Matthew Delamere, Vivian Wu, Polly Walker, Toni Collette, and Amanda Plummer.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and screenplay	Peter Greenaway¹
Festival and release	In Competition at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival (premiered 22 May 1999); UK release 10 December 1999; US release 26 May 2000¹
Principal cast	John Standing (Philip Emmenthal), Matthew Delamere (Storey), Vivian Wu, Polly Walker, Toni Collette, Amanda Plummer¹
Key crew	Cinematography by Sacha Vierny and Reinier van Brummelen; production design by Wilbert van Dorp and Emi Wada¹
Critical reception	41% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 37 reviews; audience score about 54%²

Spoilers

Premise and plot

Philip Emmenthal, a 55-year-old wealthy Genevan businessman, inherits eight and a half Pachinko parlors, the gambling houses found on Japanese city streets, and his son Storey agrees to manage them.¹ After the death of Philip's wife, Storey tries to distract his father from grief by introducing him to the women in the films of Fellini, especially Fellini Eight and a Half. Father and son then imagine creating a private bordello of their own in their large Geneva family house.¹

The result is a household of eight and a half concubines, three of them from Kyoto, where Storey manages the Pachinko palaces. Each woman has a distinctive persona: a nun, a child bearer, a gambler, a student of Kabuki, a horsewoman with a pet pig, a maid.² After about a year, the women begin to assert their own power.²

Cast and characters

The women collected by father and son come from Japan and Europe. The Japanese group includes Vivian Wu as Kito, a headstrong but emotionally repressed businesswoman who had also appeared in Greenaway's The Pillow Book; Shizuka Inoh (伊能静), saddled with gambling debts; and Kirina Mano, fascinated with female impersonators.³^•⁴ The European group includes Polly Walker as Palmira, a strong-willed woman who finds Philip more alluring than Storey; Toni Collette as Griselda, a Norwegian bank cashier who sets out to become a nun; Amanda Plummer; Barbara Sarafian as a maid angered by Philip's rejection; and Natacha Amal as a woman obsessed with the experience of being pregnant.³^•⁴

The title and its Fellini source

The film is an homage to Fellini's 8½, the surreal classic in which Marcello Mastroianni plays a film director fraught with fears, troubled love affairs, and self-doubt while making a movie. In Greenaway's film, after seeing Fellini's work at a Geneva arthouse, Philip asks, "How many film directors make films to satisfy their sexual fantasies?" and Storey answers, "I would imagine most of them."³

The fraction in the title is embodied by Giulietta (Manna Fujiwara), a simple but mysterious woman with amputated legs.⁴ The Washington Post's Desson Howe read the women not as victims but as figures who will not be bound by the men's patriarchal expectations: like the Pachinko machines in the Japanese gambling parlors where part of the film is set, they are far from calculable, "in effect, games of chance."⁴ Howe also noted that Greenaway takes Fellini's themes of sexual power, miscommunication between men and women, and the solipsism of the artist and transmutes them into his own recurring obsessions: class, chance, taboo, self-reflection, art as metaphor for existence, and the human form.⁴

Production and release

The Cannes festival record lists the producing countries as the United Kingdom, Germany, and Luxembourg, with a duration of 120 minutes.¹ Japan received it last, on 18 November 2000.⁵

Reception

The film divided critics and found little support overall. The hooting it received at Cannes was noted by The Independent's Gilbert Adair, whose own review called the film "a horror" and argued that where Fellini's film was about a terminally stalled artist, Greenaway's was by one.⁶ A survey of Greenaway's career states that accusations of misogyny resurfaced with 8½ Women, a film which found very few supporters.⁷ The San Francisco Examiner's G. Allen Johnson, reviewing the US release, called it boring and objected that a film structured around a household of women shows no real sex scenes, though he acknowledged Greenaway as a daring, constantly experimenting filmmaker who is hit-or-miss.³

Not all responses were negative. Roger Ebert gave it 3 out of 4 stars, suggesting it be viewed as "a slowed-down, mannered, tongue-in-cheek silent comedy, skewed by Greenaway's anger and desire to manipulate."² A later retrospective review in Out magazine called Greenaway one of cinema's most innovative visual compositionists and the film's breezy tone his least pretentious work in years.² On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 41% on the Tomatometer from 37 reviews, with a critics consensus that its exploration of sexual exploitation exhibits Greenaway's fondness for breaking taboos but that its ideas never come together into a satisfying whole; the audience score stands at about 54%.² An Encyclopedia.com career survey judged it arguably Greenaway's most disappointing feature, inconsequential and boring, a trial even for his most ardent supporters.⁸

Place in Greenaway's career

Greenaway, a trained painter whose work sets meticulously composed images within predetermined numerical, alphabetical, or pictorial structures, had made The Pillow Book (1996) with Vivian Wu immediately before this film.⁸^•⁹ 8½ Women continued his practice of frontal nudity of both sexes and his stated wish to be counted among "excellent pornographic writers," while its commercial gross of $424,123 reflected the narrowing audience for his features after the negative reception of The Baby of Mâcon (1993) had made his theatrical releases more sporadic.⁹ In a 2001 interview around the film's release, Greenaway defended the nude in all its sizes and shapes as part of the phenomenon of the events of life, not just the 16- to 24-year-old Californian female.¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026