DROWNING BY NUMBERS
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
DROWNING BY NUMBERS is a film by Peter Greenaway. It stars Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, and Joely Richardson, with Bernard Hill and Jason Edwards.
DROWNING BY NUMBERS was just seen at the Seattle International Film Festival and is currently being released to U.S. theaters, despite the fact that it predates THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE, & HER LOVER, which was such a succes de scandale last year in this country.
DROWNING BY NUMBERS is beautiful movie to watch, filled the touches that we have learned to expect from Greenaway. Nearly still lives of rotting fecundity -- gorgeous, painterly compositions -- charm and alarm us. Elaborate, opaque gamesmanship, death, sex, nudity, obsessive characters in a self-contained and dangerous world leave us amused, involved, troubled.
Here we have three women all named Cissie Colpitts who may be the most charming murderers in the films at least since ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. It is almost a pleasure to be done in by them. The three women principals are superb actresses and play their Cissies to the hilt. Are they the three Fates, the three Graces, are they the same person, as Madgett (Bernard Hill) the coroner asks them. They are in harmony with each other, in synch, and somewhat out of synch with our quotidian world.
Hill is wonderful as their tool, their lusting accomplice. Jason Edwards plays Madgett's son Smut. Smut is at the heart of the movie, I think, he is the gamemaster; his voiceovers give the preposterous and hilariously black rules for his elaborate games. Like the angelic dishwasher in THE COOK, he falls victim to mutilation. He is obsessed with death as is the film. So be warned.
I might as well tell you now, too, there is frontal nudity of both sexes here, lots of sex, and lots of dying. DROWNING BY NUMBERS is not as extreme in this regard as THE COOK, but I would not say it was for the squeamish either.
Look for the numbers 1-100 throughout the film. It becomes an hilarious game for the audience. There is a lot about this film that reminds me of Monty Python, too. Insane non-sequiturs, running jokes, a grave digger, joggers everywhere. Folks that are better up on their Python will be much employed here, I think.
It is my understanding that this was Plowright's film debut. Since I'm seeing this film out of all sequence, it's hard to believe. She has become a regular presence is last two years or so and a welcome one.
The cinematography was by Sacha Vierny and the result is a kind of lushness one seldoms sees outside of old-fashioned three-strip Technicolor.
I recommend DROWNING BY NUMBERS most highly.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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