or the first part of his ambitious project about a man who spends his life in prisons, concrete and abstract, UK director Peter Greenaway chose Utah as the key location. The typical Utahn, however, won’t likely be proud of the association since the state isn’t exactly shown in a loving light—unless Mormons stripping a man, painting honey on his penis and tying him to a pole in the desert is a nice light.

“The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part I. The Moab Story” played Saturday in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and marks the beginning of a trilogy that is only part of a giant multimedia project that includes 92 DVDs, an expansive Web site and a video game.

The project is a giant biography of a fictional writer, loosely based on Greenaway himself, who spends his life traveling from prison to prison, never able to escape trouble.

Greenaway said that in old works, like “Hamlet,” you can only learn as much about the character as is available in the running length. Now, he hopes to offer a full biography of a character, allowing the audience to interact and choose what areas to study. “I can now strike and organize a life for this man…and I can stretch his life to something like 3,000 light years,” Greenaway said. “Indeed, the new digital possibilities can open up these most extraordinary frontiers, and we ought to engage in them.”

Greenaway speaks fluidly in proper English, as if he’s had a day to write an essay in answer to each question.

In the 1930s, the young Luper finds himself in Utah, where he encounters his first imprisonment after the punishment his parents gave him as a child.

After he’s caught looking at a Mormon woman bathing naked in the middle of the desert, Tulse is arrested, charged with trespassing, tortured (including the aforementioned honey-on penis stuff) and beat up. Numbers appear on the screen to count the number of times Tulse is hit, which is at about 40 when the first film ends.

The Moab desert is based on the account of a man who hasn’t been there, so it looks like a combination of Spanish and Egyptian deserts, with trees and other things. Only a few still photographs show Moab as we know it.

Despite the intentionally incorrect landscape, Greenaway has in fact been to Moab. “The project obviously deals with all sorts of ideas of fate and superstition and religion,” he said. “And many, many of the items and products originate from autobiographical events. [Cinematographer Renier Van Brummelen] and I were in Moab about eight years ago…and we trespassed on some property of the national parks just outside Moab and were almost arrested.”

Greenaway was also interested in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Mormons Tulse meets appear again in Belgium, where they are helping the fascist party.

“The whole phenomenon of new religions related to landscape and the persona of people like Brigham Young and the way that the Mormon communities have organized the deserts and their use of metaphors from the desert…fascinated me deeply,” Greenaway said. “I’m interested in the way religions are constructed. How you take what you need, how you organize your beliefs according to how you want to structure your life. And I think that Mormonism, for me—and I speak as an absolute atheist—is an extraordinary, very almost contemporary example of how to construct a religion. And that to me was a fascinating investigation.”

Greenaway’s insights might offend some Utahns, but the project is on the fringe of cinematic art, so they probably won’t have to face it head on.
jeremy@red-mag.com