The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish

The Tulse Luper Suitcases is Tristan Shandy gone haywire - or Monty Python taken to even more absurd depths (my university English professor would be proud that I have remembered reading Tristan Shandy_ - The contents of the suitcases are revealed one by one : Suitcase number twelve : frogs. 92 Ways of Representing the World: #5 The bath. The number 92 is derived from the element number of uranium in the periodic table. Uranium - the purest of substances.

Tulse Luper is a detailed clerk, devoted to minutiae and a interminable scribbler who writes to the edges. His writings are being typed up by a huge host of female typographists whose only job from 9 to 5 is to type everything up he ever wrote by hand in an effort by the stationmaster and party propagandist to decipher the intent of Tulse Luper - and moreover to discover if he is a spy.

It is a multivisual experience with sights and sounds coming to you from all sides. This is only part 3 of an ambitious 16 part treatment of the history of Tulse Luper.

Peter Greenaway brings his phenomenal trilogy of Tulse Luper films to a dark and elegiac close with 'From Sark to Finish'.

World War II is coming to an end, the Cold War is looming. Death is everywhere - the Danube is clogged with the corpses of murdered Jews - the great power blocs of East and West are squaring up for their glowering stalemate. Somehow, Tulse - like the rest of us - must steer a course through the barbarism and insanity of the world, surviving in one prison only to end up in another.

Greenaway works remorselessly - and brilliantly - against the saccharine dictates of mainstream commercial cinema. One character, who deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust in a seemingly flippant and sickly humorous manner, suddenly announces "I had better not wake up and find this is real", before running off to impotently scream out his disgust and horror into an empty metal canister. Later, when Tulse is trapped in the stultifying claustrophobia of the Cold War, he shows very simple, and yet utterly futile, basic human kindness to a distraught girl who is as much a prisoner as he is. The hero cannot save the damsel in distress - all he can do is bring her a basin of hot water for her bath.

And yet, Greenaway's boundless invention and flair (brilliantly realised by his cast and crew) illuminate every frame, turning what could have been a depressing slog into a profoundly moving, thought-provoking, invigorating experience not quickly forgotten.

I recommend this film (and the whole trilogy) to all who are looking for richer, deeper, more challenging, and thus more inspiring work than can be found in mainstream cinema. "From Sark to Finish" is a beautiful and (in then older sense of the word) 'terrible' film - a worthy comment on the blood-stained 20th Century from one of our greatest and most consummate visual artists.

I wish I had some brilliant words to wrap up this epic, but I'm just exhausted by it. After being bombarded with elaborate fictions and heaps of minute detail for the past 6 hours, I've got nothing much left to say. My attention was frequently drifting, and I got the impression that you could walk away for a while and not miss much. Of course, the same could be said about THE FALLS, but the difference is I never felt like walking away during that movie. Perhaps because it's not as overwhelming, or maybe just because it's funnier. Whatever the reason, as much as I admire Greenaway and the massive amount of work and thought he puts into his films, I've had quite enough of him for a while. I will say this movie does have a nifty ending, one that puts Greenaway and his stand-in Luper in an interesting new light. But as a whole, I found it much more tedious than the previous two installments. Although who knows, maybe it's a diminishing returns thing and I'd feel the opposite if I'd watched them in reverse order.