Faded Greenaway

Is Peter Greenaway due for a revival? Ages and ages ago, when I was working at a repertory arthouse cinema in Hamilton, Ontario, Greenaway’s films were some of the most reliable box-office attractions around—whenever we had a leftover day on the calendar to fill, we’d book The Draughtsman’s Contract or The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and watch the crowds pack the place full. Even Greenaway’s 1988 film Drowning by Numbers—one of his more impenetrable exercises—was a big hit, thanks in large part to the play-along diner-placemat gimmick of hiding the numbers 1 to 100 in the background of the film.

But Greenaway’s reputation has fallen on hard times with the new century. He’s still making movies, but the last one to receive any significant distribution was 1999’s tedious 8 ½ Women. His work is not widely available on home video, and even though his films contain the sort of hidden jokes and intellectual games that would seem to make them perfect grist for the age of DVDs and fan websites, few people seem interested in plumbing their mysteries, and Greenaway’s name rarely gets mentioned anymore as a stylistic influence on younger directors. The Greenaway cult has shrunk... well, to nought.

Which makes it an interesting time to revisit two of Greenaway’s earliest critical successes: The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), which will be screening all this weekend here in Edmonton at Metro Cinema. Greenaway had already spent some 15 years as a documentary filmmaker before creating his first fiction feature, which perhaps helps to explain the remarkable self-assurance of his clean, mannered visual style, which seemed equally influenced by 17th-century Dutch painters and late-period Stanley Kubrick.

Greenaway’s chilly misanthropy recalled Kubrick as well: The Draughtsman’s Contract begins with the wealthy Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) hiring an ambitious young artist named Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins) to execute 12 drawings of her husband’s country house—Neville agrees, but only on the condition that Mrs. Herbert allow him the hospitality of her bed as well. At first, Neville seems to have free rein over the property, making one demand after another to ensure the immaculate perfection of his drawings, but soon it becomes apparent that he is merely a pawn in a much larger scheme to kill Mr. Herbert—and that the details in his drawings could be used to frame him for the crime.

It’s easy to see why The Draughtsman’s Contract captured people’s imagination. It remains Greenaway’s most accessible film, one where his highly structured style of storytelling (the creation of each of Mr. Neville’s 12 drawings function more or less as chapter stops) hadn’t yet reached the obsessive-compulsive levels of his later films, which pretty much do away with stories altogether and are basically just lists and catalogues of various objects. The film comes off as an agreeably nasty contribution to the British tradition of country-house murder mysteries, not an arid avant-garde experiment; but at the same time, Curtis Clark’s elegant photography, Michael Nyman’s neo-Purcell score, and Greenaway’s sophisticated, epigrammatic screenplay give the whole thing a satisfying high-art twist.

However, Greenaway would follow this success with A Zed & Two Noughts, a film which unfortunately suggests the path he’d choose to follow in the future, one that led towards beautiful-looking, occasionally provocative, but increasingly arid and hermetic puzzle-movies that have all the passion of a mathematical equation.

Zed is the story of two identical twins, Oliver and Oswald Deuce, whose wives are killed in a freak car accident outside the Rotterdam Zoo. The woman who was driving the other car—Alba is her name—survives, minus one of her legs... but she eventually has the other one amputated as well on the advice of her doctor. (And you get the feeling that the doctor is interested less in the woman’s health than in symmetry.) The Deuces both become sexually involved with Alba—that is, when they’re not pursuing their obsessive inquiry into the nature of death, which consists primarily of making time-lapse movies of various animals decomposing.

Greenaway is clearly more interested here in juggling symbols (twins, zebras, the alphabet) than in telling a story, and the results exert an odd fascination for about an hour, after which you start to hunger for something more emotionally involving to take place. But Greenaway has never seemed to care much for his characters—and if the movies he made over the next two decades are any indication, he doesn’t have much empathy for his audiences either.