DROWNING BY NUMBERS
Reviewed by David N. Butterworth
(c) 1991 David N. Butterworth/The Summer Pennsylvanian
Following the release of his highly controversial THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER this time last year, the Roxy Screening Rooms in Philadelphia presented a retrospective of films by eclectic British film director Peter Greenaway.
Included in that retrospective were the Art House hit THE DRAUGHTSMAN'S CONTRACT, the film which put Greenaway on the map in this country, and two Philadelphia premieres -- A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS (which prior to that time had only seen a limited run on the Bravo cable channel) and THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT.
Conspicuous by its absence was Greenaway's 1988 movie, DROWNING BY NUMBERS, a film which is only now making its much-belated Philadelphia debut. This city, it seems, has saved the best until last.
DROWNING BY NUMBERS is another visually striking essay by Britain's master of the cinematic put-on. Brimming with absurdist wordplay and an exacting eye for detail, it's a very Tall Tale of murder, mathematics, and misdirected love.
From the opening scene, you know you are not watching any ordinary film, or dealing with any ordinary filmmaker. A young girl, bedecked in an outrageous, fairy godmother-like party dress, jumps rope whilst reciting the names of the stars in the constellation. The lighting casts giant shadows on the building behind her, an imposing Regency edifice fronted by pom-pom-shaped trees. A dead bird hangs from a pole in the foreground. It's like something out of Lewis Carroll.
Three generations of women, each named Cissie, drown their husbands out of passionate detachment. They are played by Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson (who can currently be seen in TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY) and Joely Richardson. This maternal camaraderie is incisively drawn, a refreshing change after the misogynistic flourishes of A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS.
A willing ally to their sanctimonious crimes is a local coroner named Madgett (Bernard Hill). Madgett, along with his son, Smut (newcomer Jason Edwards), is an obsessive game-player, much like Greenaway himself. In love with all three women, Madgett pronounces each death an accident.
But Greenaway appears to be less concerned with plot than he is with color and composition. The writer/director uses Madgett's indulgent preoccupations with contests and counting as an excuse to exercise his own exuberant imagination, layering on the details like oils on a canvas.
In fact, many of the sequences in DROWNING BY NUMBERS -- the scenes with the apples, the white beach house against a blackening sky, the angular symmetry of the swimming pool -- are shot with a painter's eye for beauty, like a Constable landscape or a Ruebens' nude.
The numbers 1 to 100 run throughout the film like a chronometer, marking time. They start out obvious enough -- pinned to trees and tin baths, painted on buildings, cows and passers-by -- but wind up being woven into the overall fabric. It's a rich and colorful tapestry, a sumptuously crafted and richly textured experience that is at once wicked, wry and thoroughly entertaining.
If DROWNING BY NUMBERS is "about" anything, then it is about the way in which women conspire together, choking the life out of those who have disappointed them sexually, emotionally or otherwise.
A darling of the British Film Institute, Peter Greenaway made his mark in the late '60s/early '70s with a string of independently produced short films. His big break came in 1982 with the BFI-funded THE DRAUGHTSMAN'S CONTRACT, an erotically charged murder mystery set in 17th Century England. But it wasn't until the release of last year's THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER that American audiences were once again treated to the cinematic excesses of this extraordinary talent.
In keeping with the film's mood, Michael Nyman's score is somber and atypically melancholic, not the sawing strings that have punctuated his other collaborations with the director. And Sacha Vierny's photography is no less exquisite than the picture-postcard perfect views of Rome and its surrounding countryside that graced THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT.
The themes which populate most of Greenaway's films -- sex, death and decay, puns and punning, religion, numerology, entomology and ornithology -- are also very much in evidence here.
In DROWNING BY NUMBERS, Greenaway's most accessible film to date, these collective themes add together to form a bizarre jigsaw puzzle with few straight edges, a delineated, looking-glass world in which numbers count for everything and love is often left dead in the water.
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