Director Peter Greenaway relishes the fact that he exists outside the artistic mainstream. Indeed, he insists on it. Combining exquisite painterly flourishes with intellectual insight and shock tactics, he leaves no stone unturned in the pantheon of taboo subjects. He makes his films to incite his audience and, when he gets it really right as in Prospero's Books and A Zed and Two Noughts, his movies literally leave you breathless in their audacity. It goes without saying that the man has vision, even though his vision sometimes stumbles a bit.

His newest film 8 ½ Women, a self-confessed nod to Fellini's 8 ½, is not one of Greenaway's masterpieces. While his better films generally move with a sense of well-oiled precision, 8 ½ Women struggles for this same sensibility, but winds up never fully realized. It fails because it lacks some crucial intellectual beats and a simple coherent message.

Continuing his obsession with all things Japanese that started with The Pillow Book, Greenaway begins this film in Japan, a nation in thrall to Pachinko gambling parlors and frequently plagued by earthquakes. Whether it's gambling or natural disasters, these two elements set the scene for a world governed by chance. However, it's personal disaster that brings together wealthy father Philip (John Standing) and son Storey (Matthew Delamere). When Philip's wife passes away, only Storey can save his father from complete emotional disintegration. Philip is clearly the more affected of the two, devastated by the idea of being alone without the one woman who knew and accepted him, body and soul.

After a trip to the cinema to see Fellini's 8 ½, the two men become obsessed with creating a harem of ladies on their Geneva estate. There, they indulge all their sexual fantasies, paying the women handsomely for their favors, but essentially maintaining them as concubines. All this changes when the headstrong and sensual Palmira comes into the mix. As portrayed by Polly Walker, Palmira is the only authentic woman among this assortment, a creature of intellect, haughty self-reliance and sexual power, who teaches the women what it means to break the bonds of dominance.

Some of the other woman merely serve as stereotypes of various male fantasies -- the repressive Geisha Mio (Kirina Mano), the earth mother Giaconda (Natacha Amal), the chaste nun Griselda (Toni Colette) -- while others like hideously made-up doll Beryl (Amanda Plummer), who spends much of the film in medical bondage attire, and the crippled half-woman Giullietta leave us grasping at symbolic straws. Giullietta is the weakest link in the film, seemingly emblematic of something essential yet all too elusive.

Greenaway suggests that many of his female images stem from paintings -- women with horses in Gainsborough, the pregnant earth mother seen in Picasso, Klimt and Rubens -- and, indeed, art is by far one of society's greater purveyors of archetypal images. Still, Greenaway's treatment of these women is somewhat one-dimensional here, more about male fantasies than artistic renderings.

Indeed, the director is often accused of misogyny, although he denies this, claiming rather that he is instead guilty of misanthropy. Greenaway's general distrust of mankind is certainly apparent in this film, but it doesn't explain his extreme objectification of women here. Had he put more emphasis on the tables turning in the women's favor -- a plot point that occurs much too late and too simplistically -- he might have made a better argument for the male-female dichotomy he is trying to expose.

Despite the sexual ambiguity, you'll find many of the elements you expect in a Greenaway film. As always, his writing is sophisticated and impeccably realized by his actors, especially Walker and Standing, who seem to understand its underlying irony. Likewise, his canted view of the world offers up an assortment of rich imagery, including Mio's tortured Geisha dancing around a huge pig-in-bondage. Indeed, fans won't be at all disappointed in the prettiness of the film. It is vintage Greenaway in that respect, producing such memorable still-lifes as multi-colored milk shakes scattered around the house or Philip and Storey sitting in a window frame surrounded by framed paintings.

What is missing here, however, is a truly tangible theme. Certainly, Greenaway explores numerous concepts from obsession with death and sex, to the male-female power structure, to the corruption of wealth. Yet, you don't leave with a distinct message. Perhaps, as with art, Greenaway feels that each viewer should bring his own interpretation to this piece. The trouble is that there isn't enough here to interpret and the result is a sense of having missed something that could have been truly illuminating but wasn't.