Greenaway certainly isn't for everyone. Even in this film, one of his most emotional, he's a systematic and cerebral artist, driven by his obsession with games and numbers, water and birds, sex and death, along with a fascination with classic European works of art. You could almost say he isn't for anyone. Even his tiny audience of transatlantic elitists can't really keep up with his litany of sexual fetishes, technological flourishes and abstruse high-culture references; it's just that we're masochistic enough to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Since he emerged from the London avant-garde art scene with "The Draughtsman's Contract" in 1982, Greenaway has clung to the fringes of world cinema, not quite in the mainstream but never quite exiled to the art-school underground (if it still exists). His only flirtation with commercial success came in 1989 with "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" -- perhaps his darkest, cruelest and most opulent film -- and that was almost entirely accidental. A ratings brouhaha attracted viewers hoping for kinky sex; unprepared for the strangeness and density of Greenaway's work, they probably went home with the understandable impression that he was both a sadistic weirdo and an unsatisfying pornographer.

In the '90s, Greenaway seemed to retreat into a bloodless realm of pure aesthetics, as if in reaction to the post-Cold War decline of the European art-film tradition and Hollywood's global conquest. His only films to find U.S. distribution in the past decade, "Prospero's Books" (an overdecorated adaptation of "The Tempest," featuring John Gielgud in his last major role) and "The Pillow Book," with its humorless imitation of Japanese art, were extraordinarily beautiful but more than a little dull. In "8 1/2 Women," he not only conjures up the ghost of Fellini, the supreme sensualist of world cinema, but recalls his own more passionate works of the '80s, especially the marvelous if little-known "A Zed and Two Noughts."

Within the first few moments of "8 1/2 Women," we see a screen crammed with text, perhaps from the script, describing the opening montage, which we see almost at the same time: a series of spectacular exterior shots of neon-lighted Japanese pachinko parlors. Add some mysterious birdsong and an unknown cityscape, a lugubrious version of "Slow Boat to China" sung by Philip and Storey and a business meeting in which an enraged Japanese businessman punches Philip in the nose, bloodying the contract they are to sign. We are most certainly in Greenaway's territory, and if we have no idea where we're going, he seems supremely confident.

After their bereavement, it's strongly implied that Philip and Storey sleep with each other once and also enjoy a ménage à trois with a Japanese girl before settling on their Fellini scheme. They're a little abashed afterward, but it's no big deal. ("You can do anything," Storey reassures his dad in bed. "Besides, you're my father and you're very, very, very unhappy.") They experience pachinko-parlor intrigue, several earthquakes (which Storey may be causing), sumo wrestling on TV, Kabuki theater and Verdi opera, a poisoning, a drowning and an extended argument about whether Jane Austen's heroines would be good in bed.

Greenaway has never really gotten credit for his sense of humor, which stretches from elaborate visual puns to crude slapstick (e.g., Hortense the pig), and "8 1/2 Women," his saddest and most heartfelt film, is also among his funniest. At moments in this magical, mysterious work the two come together, as when Philip seems to be asking his creator and the audience to turn away from his nakedness and emptiness. He doesn't like movies, he protests: "All of us compelled to share the same emotional experience. It's too intimate." Later, when considering Jean Renoir's dictum that every man has his reasons, he asks Storey hopelessly: "Do we have reasons? No, we just have lust."

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