A Zed And Two Noughts. (15.)
Directed by Peter Greenaway. 1985.
Starring Andrea Ferreol, Eric Deacon, Brian Deacon, Frances Barber, Joss Ackland, Geoffrey Palmer and Jim Davidson. Available to stream on subscription on the BFI Player. 115 mins.
His follow up to breakthrough picture Draughtsman's Contract is the moment Greenaway really hits his stride: it's him at its most exhilarating and its most unbearably facepunchably smug. The big advance was teaming up with classic cinematographer Sacha Vierny, who shot numerous classics of European cinema (including, Last Year in Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Belle de Jour.) They would work together until Vierny's death at the end of the century.
It opens with a low flying swan causing a car crash that causes the deaths of two women, the wives of twin Zoologists (Deacons E. and B.) whose grief drives them into ever more extreme explorations into mortality: primarily time-lapse photography of decomposing animals. Where there is death there must also be sex, primarily in the shape of Frances Barber, whose exact position in the zoo is never quite explained, nor the extent of her interest in the animals. Also in the mix is Jim Davidson, astutely cast as the lowly zookeeper who is always out of the loop intellectually; the voice of David Attenborough in extensive use of clips from Life On Earth; and one of Michael Nyman's finest scores, which still sound bracing and magnificent three and a half decades on. (All those fantastic titles: Angelfish Decay, Prawn watching and Swan Rot.) The music is integrated into the film much better than in a Draughtsman's Contract.
For me the film is just marvellous but, let's be honest, it does drag in places and there is plenty more for the non-Greenaway affionado to find fault with. His puns and wordplay are often cringeworthy, like a Christmas cracker with Shakespearean pretension or a Frank Muir who has stared into the abyss of eternal nothingness, and has brought that insight to Call My Bluff.
Greenaway is famously a cold fish, or in this film a decaying cold fish, but there is a directness to the best parts of the film that are ferociously powerful. It isn't subtle but the speeded up shot of decaying animal corpses or the pans across all the installations set up to film the corpses, the lights of the camera flashing, have a brutal euphoria. Like Woody Allen he is obsessed with death (and Like Woody, expert at avoiding it – he's still going strong in his 78th year) and why not: what is art but the dance of future worm food?
Directed by Peter Greenaway. 1985.
Starring Andrea Ferreol, Eric Deacon, Brian Deacon, Frances Barber, Joss Ackland, Geoffrey Palmer and Jim Davidson. Available to stream on subscription on the BFI Player. 115 mins.
His follow up to breakthrough picture Draughtsman's Contract is the moment Greenaway really hits his stride: it's him at its most exhilarating and its most unbearably facepunchably smug. The big advance was teaming up with classic cinematographer Sacha Vierny, who shot numerous classics of European cinema (including, Last Year in Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Belle de Jour.) They would work together until Vierny's death at the end of the century.
It opens with a low flying swan causing a car crash that causes the deaths of two women, the wives of twin Zoologists (Deacons E. and B.) whose grief drives them into ever more extreme explorations into mortality: primarily time-lapse photography of decomposing animals. Where there is death there must also be sex, primarily in the shape of Frances Barber, whose exact position in the zoo is never quite explained, nor the extent of her interest in the animals. Also in the mix is Jim Davidson, astutely cast as the lowly zookeeper who is always out of the loop intellectually; the voice of David Attenborough in extensive use of clips from Life On Earth; and one of Michael Nyman's finest scores, which still sound bracing and magnificent three and a half decades on. (All those fantastic titles: Angelfish Decay, Prawn watching and Swan Rot.) The music is integrated into the film much better than in a Draughtsman's Contract.
For me the film is just marvellous but, let's be honest, it does drag in places and there is plenty more for the non-Greenaway affionado to find fault with. His puns and wordplay are often cringeworthy, like a Christmas cracker with Shakespearean pretension or a Frank Muir who has stared into the abyss of eternal nothingness, and has brought that insight to Call My Bluff.
Greenaway is famously a cold fish, or in this film a decaying cold fish, but there is a directness to the best parts of the film that are ferociously powerful. It isn't subtle but the speeded up shot of decaying animal corpses or the pans across all the installations set up to film the corpses, the lights of the camera flashing, have a brutal euphoria. Like Woody Allen he is obsessed with death (and Like Woody, expert at avoiding it – he's still going strong in his 78th year) and why not: what is art but the dance of future worm food?
