Sure, the shots are packed with meaningful details, but they also just look aesthetically amazing (best-ever work from Sacha Vierny?). For all the extraordinarily detail-oriented and symbol-packed mis-en-scene on display here (one could easily pause the film at any given scene and scour the frame for thematically "significant" details), the plot, such as it is, is complicated but actually astonishingly coherent (although watching the film multiple times certainly helps).Īs tempting as it is to treat the film strictly as a game or an intellectual puzzle (a reading which Greenaway himself doesn't exactly discourage), I think I should stress how well it works on a more immediate and visceral level, which for me is really what elevates it above some empty exercise in pure formalism. I've watched it too many times to still laugh out loud at every joke, but scene-for-scene I honestly consider it a brilliant comedy, on top of everything else.Īs is the case with virtually all of Greenaway's films, the "plot" more often than not serves as an excuse for the director to indulge in his fetish for lists and cataloguing, yet here he strikes an ideal balance between the ever-slightly-too-convoluted Draughtsman's Contract and the verging-on-gimmicky Drowning By Numbers, his other two masterpieces from this era. It's thematically dense, visually immaculate, and above all, wickedly funny, something which doesn't seem to get mentioned often enough in relation to Greenaway's work. Appropriately, considering the film's preoccupation with symmetry, to me it feels like his most "balanced" work. I find it ironic that Peter Greenaway has said that he wishes he could remake this, his "most troubled and troubling offspring", as he once called it, since not only is it one of my all-time favorite films, but I also think it is hands-down Greenaway's most singularly flawless achievement as a filmmaker.
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