Peter Greenaway (1988)

Three women (Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson), representing different generations of the same family and all named Cissie Colpitts, drown their husbands (Bryan Pringle, Trevor Cooper and David Morrissey) and negotiate the consequences with the coroner (Bernard Hill), who desires all three women.  The story is set in a world in which men devise elaborate rules for ridiculous games that they don’t play well; when it comes to water – the realm of female sexuality – they’re way out of their depth.  The rules of the games are mostly described in voiceover by the adolescent Smut (Jason Edwards), who observes rituals for and keeps a statistical record of all the violent deaths (human and animal) that he witnesses.  As his sexual curiosity develops, he becomes part of his own bloody, morbid ceremony.  The first scene of Peter Greenaway’s film features a girl skipping from one to a hundred under a night sky; she names a star for each number she counts.  The numbers 1-100 appear in consecutive scenes for the next two hours and the nearer to 100 they get, the more welcome they are.

It’s rich that Greenaway laughs at his characters’ games when his whole approach here, as in The Draughtsman’s Contract, indulges his own – and, it seems, a sizeable audience’s – taste for pointlessly ornate, ludic conundrums.  You feel that if Greenaway had to make a proper film he’d sink without trace.  His smug obscurity, in combination with the carefully composed images (photographed by Sacha Vierney), may of course disarm criticism:  if you don’t understand what Peter Greenaway is on about, how can you reject it – unless you’re a philistine?  (And the more cultural references that you get, the more a member of the elite Greenaway club you’re entitled to feel.)  This is a black comedy in a different way from The Draughtsman’s Contract:  there are dud deathly jokes – such as ‘I could never love a coroner – I’d never know if you’d washed your hands …’ and ‘Don’t try and revive him – his name’s Hardy, not Lazarus’.  You sit wondering if these one-liners are meant to be as lame as they are and/or if you’re missing something. The film creates a coherently unreal world of its own.  None of the people in it is remotely believable and the slick, jocose performances are completely synthetic but the actors are remarkably obliging to the writer-director, who keeps them denuded of character and, for much of the time, deprived of clothing.  The men in particular are required to strip naked to, in the case of the physically less trim ones, humiliating effect.  In the circumstances, Greenaway’s chivalry in exempting Lady Olivier from having to get undressed seems rather absurd sycophancy.

The main suspense is in discovering if you can be bothered to keep watching – or, rather (since the effect of the film is stupefying), whether you can be bothered to stop watching.  So why is Drowning by Numbers admired and (more incredibly) enjoyed?  I suppose it’s possible that cutting the male members of the cast down to size (ho-ho) could appeal to a very primitive kind of feminism.  Perhaps those who lap it up are the cinema/TV/video audience whose pleasure in watching films is tempered by a nagging guilt that they ought really to be making the intelligent effort to walk round art galleries or go to classical concerts instead.  Drowning by Numbers is tailor-made for this kind of filmgoer:  its arty references preserve cultural self-respect; its porno ‘sense of humour’ indicates that it knows it’s meretricious.  (Michael Nyman’s music is a typical component:  arch classical pastiche with sequences of real Mozart worked in.)   Peter Greenaway’s work is too dandified to be taken seriously and too pleased with itself to be entertaining but he confirms here that, as an auteur wanker, he’s second to none.

[1990s]