A Zed & Two Noughts

I knew how strange and unusual Greenaway could be but Zed, I believe could take the cake :). I am not sure what it is all about but I still enjoy the triumvirate Greenaway - Sasha Verny- Michael Nyman. Some ideas and images Greenaway will use in the later "8 1/2 women" and "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" - especially, the soundtrack. "Dead Ringers" and "Mon oncle d'Amérique" (two beautiful weirdnesses themselves) also come to mind while watching Greenaway's elegant tale of decomposing which is also his meditations about life, death and grief. As in earlier "The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), Greenaway explores the relationship between the close relatives - the twin brothers are in the center of "A Zed & two Noughts". The movie is also a modern retelling of an ancient myth about Leda and Zeus who took the form of a swan and slept with Leda on the same night as her husband, King Tyndareus. Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta.

Greenaway considers that 90% of his films one way or another refers to paintings. "A Zed & two Noughts" refers openly and with great admiration to the paintings of Johannes Vermeer van Delft.

"A Zed & two Noughts" is not easy film to watch, its characters are not sympathetic, it lacks warmth and sentimentality but as always in Greenaway's films, it is a feast for eyes, ears, and for brain.

7.5/10

This is definitely one of the more disgusting films I've watched, and not in a good way. This movie made me physically ill, and though it was mind-bending and beautifully coreographed, the subject matter and the lead characters' inevitable decline into utter insanity that is characteristic of Greenaway films was a bit much for me. I'm saying this and I loved Santa Sangre. Go figure.

A pair of twin brothers (who have different hair color somehow, and as it turns out were originally Siamese twins) become obsessed with the subjects of decay, evolution, and greif when their wives are killed in a car crash at the Zoo. They start conducting utterly repulsive experiments that involve time-elapse films of animals and fruits rotting away. And to top it all off, there's a plot in all of this, by a couple of poachers posing as zoo staff who plan to make a profit from all this. The rest is just entirely too disgusting/weird/complicated to explain clearly, but I will give you some hints about the ending: It involves a rack. And snails. And floodlights. And a record player.

Peter Greenaway is arty. Painfully so. However he readily admits that this film is "self-conscious", "manufactured" and he says that all cinema is probably as "artificial" a form as you can get.

This film is beautiful to look at. Greenaway was inspired, visually, by paintings of the mid 17th century, particularly those of Vermeer. Almost every shot is composed like a painting. Many of the shots are symmetrical, walls are filmed flat so that the horizontal lines are parallel with the top and bottom of the frame. Objects are placed on tables as if subjects for a still life. Lighting is used in an alternation of light, shade,light,shade receding to the back of the picture, which is a signature of the type of 17th century, Western art that Greenaway is paying homage to.

The substance of the film follows weighty themes, all of which are explained in great detail through the director's commentary: evolution, light and twin-ship.

What is lacking is emotion. This is a cerebral film. Your emotional reaction to it will be through the imagery, be it beautiful or repulsive. You will not engage with the characters on an emotional level. You'll find them hard to relate to. The performances are stilted and amateur theatrical. It is fortunate, then, that Michael Nyman provides a fantastic score (present on almost every scene and almost outstaying its welcome) which prevents the dialogue (the script leaves a lot to be desired too) rendering everything flat.

Rent this if you enjoy visuals for their own sake, if you wear spectacles and if you like holding your chin in your hand and frowning. I qualify on all those points, so I enjoyed it a great deal.

Extra points for an extraordinarily thorough director's commentary on the DVD which serves to pull out all the hidden depths. Though one could make the point that an explanation that adds so much extra understanding leaves you feeling that the film failed adequately to convey much of what was intended.

DVD easter eggs (worth seeing): http://www.dvd.net.au/hidden.cgi?movie_id=10484

A rewarding post modern film about life and decay and the effects of a single moment on a person's life. Great sets and photography by the legendary cinematographer Sacha Vierny, this film makes you ultra aware that you are watching a film, or a sort of theatrical filmed piece. Greenaway is an aquired but very rewarding taste, and no other director makes films as he does. A disturbing somber film for serious fans of modern cinema. Greenaway is a must in your education of film.

All you need to make cinema is a point of view (and of course the view to which it points). Or a frame of reference and the reference which it frames. In Greenaway all these exist together, knowingly, as forms within forms.

A story of twins looking to overcome grief by studying the decay of death is the reference here. Zebras, lizards, swans, we see the empty shells of body decay before the camera. Kept under the scrutiny of our gaze in life, inside cages, they remain under it once dead. At what point do all these symmetries which conjoined together make up the miracle of life stop being the sum of their parts, and by which process; how much of these parts that we understand as the self can be taken out before the self is no longer recognized; and the symmetry once broken, what mystery renews it.

These obscure ruminations are framed against the question of existence, which implies god and pattern. How come that something so systemised, so perfectly designed and evolved from nothing, from amoeba and algea, can come to pass by the whim of chance? Having taken millions of years for creation to unravel its complexity, why does it take a second to destroy it? Which is to ask, at what point does the system, which in hindsight appears ordained and patterned, become random and meaningless.

Various eccentricities are enacted in this process, all pointing to some kind of symbolic nakedness.

When the legless woman gives birth to new life, twins again, the old twins, the blueprint for them, must step aside. The film ends with an poignant thought. Having carefully staged their own death so that the decay that follows may be captured on film, we see how nature intrudes upon this scene and foils the effort.

An atheist himself, Greenaway here gives us a pessimism that cuts deep; no consciousness survives this.