Eight and a half Women (8 ½ Women)

Philip Emmenthal, a wealthy Genevan businessman inherits eight and a half Pachinko Parlours, the gambling houses found on every Japanese city high street. His son, Storey, agrees to manage them and he acquires Japanese enthusiasms which include a fascination for Japanese earthquakes which appeal to his gambling spirit of ungiveable odds. Who can bet on death by earthquake? After the death of Philip’s wife, Storey tries hard to distract his father’s grief, and he introduces him to the splendour, excitement and variety of the women in the films of Fellini, especially the women in Fellini’s masterpiece, Fellini Eight and a Half. Father and son begin to imagine the possibilities of inventing a private bordello of their own in their large Genevan family-house. They recruit Simato, a Japanese female Pachinko addict, deeply in debt to her gambling habits, Mio, a Japanese Kabuki enthusiast hopelessly fascinated by male female-impersonators, and Kito, a Japanese business woman who falls in love with Storey. They blackmail the financially suspect Griselda to make her a nun in body if not in spirit. They coerce the horsewoman, Beryl, stealer of valuable horses from Saudi Arabian horsebreeders. They save an ever pregnant Giaconda from the threat of imprisonment for selling babies. They lay themselves open to Clothilde, Philip’s wife’s favourite servant, who has designs to curb Philip’s profligacy. They entertain a mysterious half-woman whose halfness could be transvestitism, androgyny, immaturity, or merely a truncated body in a wheelchair. And they become hopelessly susceptible to Palmira, impossible masculine dream of the whore with a heart of gold. But the fantasies of a late twentieth century, well organised, private harem falter. Male sexual fantasy is overawed. The females exhaust the sexual paradise and the men become confused, tired, bored and eventually outmanoeuvred. The bordello collapses. Every women has her reasons. Philip tries one last fantasy and succeeds in dying in delicto. His son, left with a house emptied of sexual wish-fulfilment, finds a dramatic death in the grip of the earthquake he always knew would get him in the end. The women have victoriously escaped, but the men have victoriously found a certain personal happiness