Peter Greenaway, who made his provocative name in the ’80s (“The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover”), is back with a film about his idol: Sergei Eisenstein. The movie concerns the Russian director’s doomed attempt to make a film in Mexico in 1930.

The focus is not on the daily work of Eisenstein (Elmer Bäck, whose rolling R’s sound like a car stuck in the mud), but on what Greenaway imagines as his sexual awakening. Eisenstein was gay, and here he has an explicitly rendered affair with a handsome Mexican guide (Luis Alberti).

The film has all the incessant showiness that can make Greenaway irksome: split screens, CGI, deliberately alienating performances. But the man loves a beautiful shot and a witty line; those are the things that carry the film.