The Belly of an Architect

“Art is the food for madness.”

Rome, 1987. Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy), an American architect obsessed with detail, arrives with his much younger wife Louisa (Chloe Webb) to mount an exhibition honoring the 18th-century builder Etienne-Louis Boullée. They conceive a child on the train, and soon his attention fixes on her swelling belly and on the pains in his own stomach. Peter Greenaway frames Rome in rigid, symmetrical compositions, and the city starts to look like a drawing board.