Peter Greenaway is a cinematic formalist frustrated by the limitations of the silver screen. In recent years, he has found more artistic satisfaction through doing art installations and warehouse happenings. The Tulse Luper Suitcases was a multi-media project that included a website, 3 movies (divided into tv-series friendly episodes), and a club night art installation. Peopling the Palaces at Veneria Reale used 100 projectors to animate the walls of the palace. For the past decade, Greenaway has been creating projector video installations on classic art paintings to dissect their intricacies through projected light and music. All this to say, he’s REALLY bored with the single screen presentation, and spends his time trying to break out of it.

Eisenstein in Guanajuato is part of Greenaway’s other major trend of the new millennium: reimagining art events to fit in with his own worldview and obsessions: sex and death. At the age of 32, Sergei Eisenstein (Elmer Bäck) found himself in Guanajuato, Mexico filming a stylistic travelogue of sorts using money from American backers. Instead of finding Mexico, Eisenstein found himself. Rather than taking even a fleeting interest in making the movie he owed to his backers, Sergei spend his time losing his virginity and falling in love with his well-endowed bisexual guide, Palomino Cañedo (Luis Alberti).

Bäck’s Eisenstein is an adult as an arrested development homosexual finally discovering what it means to live. The center of Eisenstein’s Mexican odyssey is his bed, physically taking a larger than life presence in Guanajuato. It’s in his bed that he greets his financiers, is deflowered by Palomino, and discovers his newly discovered meaning of life. Consumed by endorphins, Eisenstein turns into a teenager complete with a hyperactive and unfocused personality, emphasized by Greenaway’s hyperactive camera and rapid-fire editing splicing in Eisenstein’s erotic drawings and newsreels while repeatedly splitting the screen into panels.

Structurally, Guanajuato is one of Greenaway’s most simplistic films, telling a more or less linear love story of an gay adult eschewing responsibilities so he could get laid. Greenaway’s blunt attitude toward Eisenstein’s swooning romantic love keeps the story from doing any real deep dives into the usual cesspool of bad gay movie cliches. There’s little here that belies Greenaway’s usual darkly cynical tendencies to perversely torture his subjects. Instead, Eisenstein and friends rant about the state of film, and Marxism, Russian politics, sexuality, and death.

If Eisenstein in Guanajuato lacks, its that Greenaway’s budget is constantly shrinking, but the ambition rarely does. Much like The Tulse Luper Suitcases and Goltzius and the Pelican Company, Guanajuato has an obviously small budget without shrinking its ambitions. Greenaway once specialized in lush brilliant photography, but his films have increasingly embraced a college-student digital aesthetic.

There’s a lot to love in here. The formalism is mostly on point, and Greenaway’s take on the adult romance is sweet without being saccharine. Because this is Peter Greenaway we’re talking about, one longs for his more sadistically byzantine, intellectually challenging works. Still, this is far more emotionally romantic, and bizarrely more real, than most modern coming of age queer films.