Drowning by Numbers

I was ready to shut this movie off during the opening credits. A young girl skips rope as she names the stars in the cadence of her count 13-Rigel, 14- get it? Now you'd think most filmmakers would pick up this little symbol at a point near its end, but not Peter Greenaway. We see the whole count. I nearly fell asleep before the movie title appeared.

I'm glad I didn't. This is one weird movie, but a charming entertainment. The counting to 100 in the rope-jump prefigures the appearance of the numbers one through a hundred in sequence throughout the movie. It's fun after a while to see if you can spot them or to predict their appearance.

The plot, such as it is, centers around three women with the same name who all drown their husbands, with the assistance of the coroner, an inveterate gamesman. The other main character is the coroner's bizarre number-obsessed son, who narrates, and actually does most of the numbering that marks the progress of the film. The main characters are all utterly amoral.

Does the plot really matter? It's a black comedy, and a puzzle. The people are real, but they aren't. "The play's the thing". The film is odd and personal. I loved it. You may not. It reminded me of TV's famous "The Prisoner".

Peter Greenaway wrote and directed. The script is dryly amusing. The visual presentation is poetic and rich with symbols. The camera angles are unusual, befitting the material photographed. The landscape is ethereal, not unlike Prospero's Island in Greenaway's The Tempest. Except maybe for Zefferelli, nobody creates a richer texture of visual imagery.

For me, the only disappointment was an unsatisfying ending. I guess this was how it had to end. I couldn't come up with a better solution to the puzzle, but I wanted the characters to fare better than they did, and the fate of the boy-narrator seemed unduly harsh.

Still and all, it was Greenaway's game, and that's how he played it. I'm not sure why anyone financed this film, because the potential audience is small.

But I sure liked it.

The notion is the same. All things move towards their end, as Nick Cave would romantically have it. Or die violent, arbitrary deaths, as Greenaway would. Bees, cows, men, we are witness to all these deaths, how all of creation is inadvertently eclipsed, as marked one to 100. We need not see any more because as a girl jumping rope says while counting stars, after you count to the first 100 all the other hundreds are the same. It's enough to understand the replicated pattern.

Various games with stakes in the film mirror the one game, life, where existence is the stake, various conspiracies attempt to unlock the meaning, while others obfuscate it. That these deaths, of three husbands at the hands of their wives, are the result of cruel whims and little more. That there's no grand plan or ultimate purpose that justifies the loss, Greenaway always the pessimist and cynical.

The most interesting character in all this is the coroner's son. Who, as his father devises elaborate games to pass idle time, with boyish innocence he wants to know the simplest answers of the universe. How many leaves on a tree, how many hair on a dog? And who commemorates the passing of living things by lighting up fireworks.

Greenaway generally knows how to make an interesting film that is intellectual but not dyspeptic. The fun here is in the form of a typically British black comedy, where deaths are clumsily covered-up and the noose around the culprits' neck is pulled tighter all the time.

He's done better work but this worth watching. If only for the cinematic fireworks of Sacha Vierny.

Such an obviously non-American film. I believe this was the first time I had seen Joan Plowright, and she was so good. Having seen more of her work since, I know this is no fluke. Everyone else was also good here, especially Joely Richardson and Bernard Hill. I won't go into any detail, but the movie is weird, weird, weird, and has a dark subject matter without being a dark film. Highly recommended for those looking for something different. Grade: A

One woman in three bodies. Games about death, with death as a rule, and as a consequence. Life as this game and vice versa. The scoring of the game, the ruling of the script according to numbers. Sequential skipping through the numbers as a way of adumbrating the game to tell a story.

Another masterpiece from Greenaway, his most accessible in my view. But that makes it a lesser work compared to his others, because the story is perfectly comprehensible. One can see how his notion of structured visual allegory with narrative footnotes starts to emerge here. The latest I have seen at this writing is The Pillow Book where this is all so much more elaborate and integrated into the narrative. But this film still charms. I wish I could personally thank the financier.

I saw the movie at a local art-house cinema, and was instantly converted to the church of Greenaway/Nyman. I raved so much about it that my philestine friends finally agreed to rent it.

Of course, the rented version was pan-n-scanned. It was truly awful. As bad as the original was good. Much of the Greenawaynian charm is his flair for composing scenes visually. Pan-scanning deprives you of almost all the fun. Besides whoever did the pan scanning didn't get the spot-the-numbers game. Several were lost out of frame.

Don't bother renting it on VHS. Maybe the DVD will get it right. Until then, ask the Brattle or your local cinema paradiso to show you it in all its glory.