Drowning by Numbers (1988)

Cissie Colpitts 2, Cissie Colpitts 1 and Cissie Colpitts 3

Peter Greenaway films always make me want to make movies.  I’ve watched a few of his films for The Penciltonian - ‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover’ (1989), and ‘The Baby of Macon’ (1993, but I didn’t write it up because it was too horrible), and they always fascinate me.  He was trained as a painter, and came to cinema as a visual medium (which is what it is); he’s dismayed (or so he tells us in every interview) that most films are illustrated versions of novels, presenting pre-existing prose stories, rather than making more original use of cinema’s potential.

‘Drowning by Numbers’ is a film about drowning and counting.  It regards three women, all named Cissie Colpitts, who realise they can drown their husbands and get away with it by asking the local coroner nicely.  He’s a friend of the family, and he’s in love with them all.  These are not the only Cissie Colpittses in the Greenaway canon - there are three more in ‘The Falls’ (1980), and one in the three volumes of ‘Tulse Luper Suitcases’ (2003-2004).  No relation.  Anyway, as it transpires, it’s quite easy to drown people if you don’t have a particularly good motivation to do so, as the victim doesn’t see it coming.

Cissie Colpitts (Joely Richardson), and Bellamy (David Morrisey)

The film opens with an unnamed child, a real Bonnie Langford type, wearing a flouncy dress, and skipping with a rope; with each skip, she gives a number, and names one of the stars in the sky.  We see and hear her render one hundred of them.  It's quite a long, methodical way to start a film.  The numbers appear again throughout the film, starting with a ’1’ in the next scene, right up to a ‘100’ in the final shot, often written on walls or signs or bees.  It’s a pattern to follow, a game in a film about games.  'Drowning by Numbers’ is an art film.

It’s a film you’d watch for the ideas, not for the emotion.  The actors are excellent (and rightly famous), the characters are engaging, and the dialogue is interesting and amusing, but the film is so deliberately odd, so overtly theme-led as to throw up a verfremdungseffekt, deliberately alienating the viewers.  The piece, the staging, the lighting and the plot are beautiful, but obviously artificial.  Characters’ particular obsessions pepper their dialogue very heavily, and everything comes back to water, and to counting.

Bees 45 and 46

I’ve heard it said that Peter Greenaway only has one film, which he keeps making again and again.  I’m not sure if I quite agree, but it has the ring of truth.  Since 1981, their plots have generally been very close - an artist, a cook, an architect, or on this occasion a coroner, sets himself a task, probably something which will set up a lasting legacy, which may involve sex as a perk, or payment.  There’s a big bed that serves as a stage, there’s a big meal, there’s a big conspiracy with all the subtlety of Hamlet’s players; and then there’s more sex, which is generally sad or awkward, never sexy.  And in the end our hero dies, and/or has their eyes put out.  But his films aren’t really about plot, they’re about lighting, colour, themes, patterns and decay.

If the films are all similar, then what makes this one stand out?  That’s a tricky question.  It might have the best roles for women.  As above, there’s normally a male protagonist at the core of the film.  There is here, too, but his story is very much secondary to that of the three Colpittses - Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson are each excellent as Cissie, and it’s those characters who make the decisions that drive the story (though it seems certain choices run in the family).  They're almost the only characters to have forenames.  What else is different about this film?  I’d suggest the thing with the numbers, except that ‘Tulse Luper Suitcases’ does something a little similar; or the great quantity of dead animals on screen, except that ‘A Zed & Two Noughts’ (1985) trumps all over that record.  The South Coast scenery, perhaps, and the particularly misty feel of the air.  I think ‘Drowning by Numbers’ is more overt about its artificiality than any of Greenaway’s classic works, though it has some stiff competition.

Cissie Colpitts (Joan Plowright) and Madgett (Bernard Hill)

It’s not my favourite of his films.  That honour goes either to ‘The Falls’ or ‘The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover’, but I’ve probably over-watched those two.  I’ve been really looking forward to seeing this one again.  Like ‘A Zed and Two Noughts’, it’s really enhanced by its new blu-ray release.  Normally I don’t care about the novelty of high-definition, but Michael Nyman’s music - always a star in its own right - sounds much richer when it’s less compressed, and the DVD release of this film was a particularly awful transfer.  The film is much clearer, now.  When someone puts this much attention into framing, lighting and cinematography, it’s good to be able to watch it as they intended.


P.S. 1988 was an exciting year for films.  This is the year that gave us The Last Temptation of Christ, A Short Film About Killing, Akira, Die Hard, Drowning by Numbers and My Neighbour Totoro.  Since it was also the year of 'First We take Manhattan', 'The Satanic Verses' and 'Remembrance of the Daleks', I'd be happy to see another 1988, at least in the arts.

A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)

Do excuse my wonky screen-caps - I'm photographing my TV again

We're nearing the end of the Penciltonian now, so as well as watching films from those last few years, I'm tidying up a number of loose ends.  I was keen to watch a film for every letter of the alphabet, and found that I had, quite appropriately, left Z for last.  Since I didn't have the time to watch 'Die Zweite Heimat' (1993) before the end of the year, I turned to 'A Zed and Two Noughts', a pleasingly literal choice for the letter.

Like most Peter Greenaway films, this is full of wit, conspiracies, nudity and astoundingly attractive cinematography.  So much symmetry, such colour.  Greenaway's introduction to the film points out the myriad myriads of light-sources used, from sunlight and starlight to different kinds of bulbs, flames, sparks and rainbows, and with this in mind the uses of light and colour in the film are really quite remarkable.  Some images anticipate my favourite Greenaway film, 'The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover' (1989): a woman in flamboyant, ancient reds in a pink-lit lavatory, or the fascinating or horrible treatment of food that is no longer food.

Venus de Milo (Frances Barber) and a zebra.

"The wives of two zoologists die in a car driven by a woman called Bewick who's attacked by a swan on Swan's Way".  The zoologists, identical twins, obsess over decomposition, grow more identical, and begin to liberate zoo animals for Alba Bewick, who loses a leg but grows more symmetrical.  Though the film is enjoyable and engrossing, you must never watch it it while eating your dinner: it's a beautiful picture, studded with time-lapse footage of decay - apples, prawns or zebras, passing from near life to maggots to brown mush.

The cast includes credible actor Geoffrey Palmer, arrestable comedian Jim Davidson, David Attenborough as narrator of a nature documentary, and a piquant part for Frances Barber, who I know better as Doctor Who's intensely villainous Madame Kovarian, here playing Venus de Milo, a writer of erotic animal stories.  It's a curious and exciting cast, and a film that lingers long in the memory.

---

I haven't found a film that looks and sounds better.  Magnificent light, colour and framing, and a pulsing, obsessive, urgent score by Michael Nyman.  This was the first film I looked at on blu-ray, and is the only film I would recommend to you in that handsome, unnecessary format.

A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978)

'A Walk Through H' is one of my favourite pieces of art, and worth just as much as a visit to a gallery.  It's pictures and narration, so my comments will follow suit.

The story is told in 92 maps, with occasional birds.
It's almost animation, but the pictures don't move, only the camera does.

A red path has guided the ornithologist through these many maps,
but may not be reliable.

The maps begin to fade, leaving only the image of a signpost,
or the skeleton of a windmill.

The maps hail from a variety of sources, and seem to have been selected by
Tulse Luper.  In reality, they're drawn and painted by Peter Greenaway,
my favourite director, and a painter at heart.

The maps have an unusual beauty.

An important map, reproduced from a bogus ecological textbook.

This map was stolen from Van Hoyten, the Owl Keeper at Amsterdam Zoo.
Van Hoyten appears (in person) in 'A Zed and Two Noughts' (1985),
which I hope to tell you of some other time.

A map on the plumage of an upside-down partridge. 

"My wife took a drawing I had bought to be framed. It was a drawing I didn't know too well, but well enough to know that, when it came back, it had been exchanged for another. This is that replacement. I said nothing to my wife but, taking the receipt, I went to find the frame-maker. I couldn't find him. I mentioned to my wife that I'd passed the shop where she'd had the drawing framed, she only looked surprised for a moment."

As the ornithologist nears the end of his journey, time is taken for
exultant music, and many birds. 

"Tulse Luper suggested my journey through H needed 92 maps. Anticipating my question he suggested the time to decide what H stood for was at the end of the journey and by that time it scarcely mattered."

---

This film is on Volume 1 of The Early Films of Peter Greenaway, along with 'Windows' (1976) and 'H is for House' (1974), which I have talked about elsewhere.  Volume 2 has my favourite, 'The Falls' (1980), which I would have made you read about and watch, dear reader, were my copy not on semi-permanent loan to an actress in Leeds.

The Belly of an Architect (1987)

I first discovered the films of Peter Greenaway when I was at university, and quickly embraced and devoured 'The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover', 'The Draughtsman's Contract' and 'A Zed and Two Noughts' (1989, 2 and 5 respectively).  They were strange films, full of astonishing images, rather extraordinary scripts, Michael Nyman's pulsing, repetitive, slightly baroque music and all-round slightly too much sex and nudity (generally functional rather than salacious or enjoyable for its participants) for my prudish tastes.

It's been increasingly rare since then, to get my hands on a Greenaway film I haven't seen.  When I found no delight in 'The Pillow Book' (1996) or '8 1/2 Women' (1999) I worried all the good ones were gone.  'The Belly of an Architect', though, hails from the 1980s, the seat of Greenaway's greatest glories.

Peter Greenaway trained as a painter, and tends to fill the frame

with symmetries, geometric patterns, well-chosen colour.

'The Belly of an Architect' is the story of Stourley Kracklite, a minor architect neglecting his own work and reputation to stage an exhibition in Rome celebrating Étienne-Louis Boullée, a similarly obscure architect whose best works were never even built, and (since this is a Peter Greenaway film) Kracklite runs into a web of conspiracy, adultery and death, all framed and shot with a striking deliberateness.

(I suspect Boullée's memory and legacy were as much buoyed by this film as painter James Ensor's were by They Might Be Giants' song 'Meet James Ensor'.  In both cases an artist on the edge of obscurity was hailed and given a fresh audience by a modern artist with a cult following.)

The average human intestine is 27 feet long

As his wife's belly swells with pregnancy, so Stourley Kracklite's swells with some nameless curse.  He's right to grow paranoid, as his colleagues and his own self-neglect threaten to wrest his legacy from him, ultimately leaving him more obscure than the centuries-dead Boullée.  He turns to investigation, roams the city, sees terrible things, looks through keyholes, and discovers he is both replaced and doomed.

It's a pretty unpleasant set of characters, but Brian Dennehy's performance as Kracklite looms over them all, leaving him at the centre of the film, likewise dominating the centre of the frame.  Just as 'A Fistful of Dollars' (1964) can be seen as a film with one character and a load of Mexicans (if I may oversimplify somewhat), so this is a film full of Stourley Kracklite.  Not that the other characters aren't interesting or well played - they are merely satellites orbiting the story of his swollen gut, and when his belly's story ends, everyone else becomes irrelevant.

Kracklite, Stourley Kracklite.

I can't imagine I'll revisit this film with the same regularity as 'The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover' or 'The Falls' (1980), but I'll happily put it with 'Drowning By Numbers' (1988) and 'Tulse Luper Suitcases' (2003) as an interesting film to watch occasionally.  The fact that it has such a strong central character (as opposed to the mere agents of wit and story who feature in earlier pieces) makes it rather easier to consume.  I've some wariness of recommending any Peter Greenaway films, as I can see he really won't be to everybody's tastes, but if you like stomachs and architecture (an art-form generally neglected by cinema, when compared to the number of films about painters or musicians, say), you might find this film tickles your fancy.

---

Available from the BFI in a set containing both Blu-ray and DVD.  Handy if you want to see it in high quality, but also take screen-captures for some kind of film-review blog.  The set also includes a 15-minute Peter Greenaway documentary about what a good businessman Terrance Conran is.  And why not?

Short films of Peter Greenaway (1974, 1976)

Windows (1974)

This was one of the first films I watched in my 'hundred films from hundred years' experiment, so it's one I've had a lot of cause to mention in lists.  I wish it had a longer or slightly more substantial title, as even I keep expecting an operating-system related adventure, rather than a catalogue of the fallen.

When I was writing up 'Lieutenant Kijé' it struck me that almost all of the films I'd been watching featured battles, murders or other forms of violent death.  'Ah,' I thought, 'but the Peter Greenaway shorts surely don't have any homicides in them, as they aren't character-based narratives'.  A moment's research revealed to me that, despite its three-and-a-half minute duration, 'Windows' has a higher body-count than 'Terminator 2' (1991) - albeit deaths described rather than shown.  As the opening sentence puts it, 'In 1973, in the parish of W, thirty-seven people were killed as a result of falling out of windows'.

The film goes on to enumerate and categorise the generalised circumstances, professions and ages of the nameless people.  During this collated data, set to persistent harpsichord music, we're treated to some 16mm footage of a house's windows, and the sights beyond.

'...the remaining adults were all under 71,

save for a man believed by some to be 103.'

I know how tempting it is, given a house, a camcorder and almost nothing else, to make zero-budget thrillers and intense five-minute dramas about two characters and a puppet - so it shows commendable restraint on Greenaway's part, or perhaps a sign that the stories he wants to tell are far more different, more like art - that he can take the time and the film and make something almost devoid of humans interacting with one another.  Aside from a few brief shots of his wife in the garden, this is a film without people in the pictures.  Window frames and ledges, vertical features, distant plants and trees.

I've long delighted in Peter Greenaways films and often wish I could tell stories the way he does in his later career - but our beginnings and our urges when given film-making tools seem here so radically different that the workings of his mind must be somehow artistically opposite to mine.  I watch these films and try to work him out.

H is for House (1976)

'H is hemiptera, homoptera and hymenoptera'

Peter Greenaway is a director unusually concerned with visuals.  Unusually because, having trained as a painter, and counting film as a visual medium first and foremost, he doesn't match pictures to a plot or dialogue, preferring to work the other way around.  The pictures, the light and shade, composition and colour come first.  Why make the film follow its characters' stories?  Why not arrange the film alphabetically (as he did in his 1980 directory epic 'The Falls').  'H is for House' also muses on the alphabet as a tool of categorisation.

Interspersed with lists of words beginning with H ('H is for Home-movie and Hollywood and R is for Russets') we hear dry but hugely improbable stories about unnamed characters, deliberately-dull fairy tales about town-planning and satirical opticians, boiled down to the most concise of tellings.

'H is for cigar.  Havana cigar'

Perhaps by merit of using the same house and camera, this feels like a sequel to 'Windows'.  It has the same aggressive music driving the film - but rather than harpsichord, this time it's a loud recording of The Four Seasons that keeps the viewer going.  Like 'Windows', this might be a comedy, if it's anything, and I'm glad to take it as one.  It has a curious wit, and what it could possibly mean, if it's not some kind of satire, I cannot say.

P. S. These films are so very short ('Windows' would fit eighty-two times into 'Die Nibelungen') that I'll very probably be watching some more sensibly-lengthed films for 1974 and 1976.  Any suggestions?

P. P. S. The next review will be the most Christmassy 'Miracle on 34th Street' (1947), and the next film I'll watch will be 'Finding Neverland' (2004).

P. P. P. S. The 'P.S.' above stands for 'Pencilton Says'.  Pencilton is a small, fluffy owl puppet, and while owls are often wise, Pencilton is not.  He is, however, correct on this issue.  'P.P.S.' stands for 'Pencilton Probably Says', probably.  The extra 'P' in this entry stands for Peter Greenaway.

---

Oh, treat yourself with a copy of 'The Early Films of Peter Greenaway volume 1', why doncha?  These are merely the shortest two items, and you'd also be able to discover 'A Walk Through H' in all its cartographical beauty, and a couple of other snippets.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989)

I should say from the off that this is one of my favourite films, and by my favourite director, Peter Greenaway.  It's a beautiful thing with its excessively rich use of colour, its symmetry, its huge, perfectly framed sets, its poetic justice, its many depictions of grand cookery (which is like grand larceny, with cucumbers and swans) and its overwhelming Michael Nyman soundtrack.

I had forgotten - until I pondered lending it to a friend - quite how grotesque and horrible it is.  Not that its beauty hides or is undermined by its excessive violence, its obscene central character, its desperate, fraught and interrupted sex and its coupling of nudity with stinking, decaying and maggot-filled meat.  In a way it all works together to make a strange, horribly engrossing feast of sound, colour and performance.

Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) laughs at prairie-oysters

Michael Gambon's character is so watchably aggressive and churlish here that it's almost difficult to properly condemn his long campaign of his bullying, belching, eating, merry-making and stabbing, his fumbling attempts at pretentiousness, his place as the king of a court of English gangsters.  He's disgusting and despicable, yet despite all the hatred he exercises against his wife, his gang and his enemies, I feel sorrow for his character and at the same time want to see him die.  I can believe in someone so powerful and pathetic.  I condone nothing he does, save for the eating of food, but the performance and character are fantastically engaging.  How pleasingly different a role for the man now better known as Albus Dumbledore.

I must speak again about the visual feast.  In the restaurant, where most of the action plays out, everything is a regal red.  The walls, the curtains and the costumes.  Rich, sumptuous, bloody, and dominated by a painting in the same hues and character.  As soon as the action moves to the kitchen, however, the same characters' clothes become greenest green, matching the drapes, the lights and the vegetables.  Blue outside, where the dogs are continuously barking, and pure white in the women's toilets.  The first time I saw this I took it to be some trick of lighting - but no!  These places are different worlds, without compromise.

Like saying, ha ha, 'death, I'm eating you!'

In competition with the feverishly colourful visuals is Michael Nyman's finest work, his funeral march Memorial, which rightly has its own Wikipedia page (at once the cheapest and greatest accolade of any notable work).  Twelve driving minutes of minimalist Purcellian honking, bearing some of the most exciting and alarming soprano vocals I've ever been glad to hear.  It matches the film perfectly.

Incidentally, the film has the highest score of all the Greenaways in the 's/he's been in Doctor Who' game, with Michael Gambon, Roger Lloyd Pack and Alex Kingston, in that order of prominence.  Of actors unconnected to Doctor Who (is it concerning that my mind really works this way?) I must point out the rare acting performance from Ian 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick' Dury, and apologise for so far failing to mention Helen Mirren and Richard Bohringer as the eponymous wife and cook, who make a long conversation towards the end, about voyeurism and how to decide what to charge for items on the menu, the highlight of the film, bar the finale.

If you've the stomach for it, I'd urge you towards The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.  Sumptuous, horrible, beautiful and alarming - a combination I find bizarrely appealing.

Cucumber-chopping cutaway in a scene with near-tasteful nudity

P.S. I'd meant my comments on this blog to be quite a bit shorter than this.  Do excuse me.

P.P.S. If you happen to be my mother, do not watch this film.  It just isn't your sort of thing.

---

Tempted to watch the film? You could buy it on DVD. Or, you know, you could borrow my copy, but not everybody lives very near my shelves.