Chronology as Topography

Like all good readers of Borges and Calvino, Greenaway has a notion of the past that is more topographical than temporal, and so chronology need not dictate causality. DROWNING BY NUMBERS, it appears, was a script finished right after THE DRAUGHTSMAN's CONTRACT, but at the time the project “failed to get off the ground.” Now that it follows A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS and THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT, any similarity with the film that made the director famous becomes vastly more suggestive with the hindsight of an intervening history. Is DROWNING BY NUMBERS a return to home ground – the English countryside – after two foreign forays that had a mixed reception? Or a heroic – Greenaway might say “gay” – effort, in the teeth of his previous protagonists’ pessimism and failure, to finish unfinished business and not leave drafts unexecuted?

It might even be a film that interrogates his own work's obsessions, this time not merely through a fictional stand-in for the filmmaker (the coroner joining the cartographers, surveyors, draughtsmen, animal behaviorists and architects) but for what his personal obsessions mean within that part of English culture he willy-nilly “represents.” Because Greenaway has become an international auteur he now has to suffer the attendant ambiguities: celebrated abroad, but deeply dividing the critics at home. Shunned by a mass public, though not without a devoted following who tend to use him as the stick with which to beat a (typically English?) parochialism that complains of his emotional “coldness,” his cerebral gymnastics, his treatment of actors as pegs on which to hang esoteric ideas. Abroad, especially in France, it is his “Englishness,” his eccentricity and yes, his parochialism that is prized, recognized and that, finally, constitutes a major part of his assets.

Contracts and Conspiracies

But what secures Greenaway his claim to loyalty and an audience is that, like any other “serious” artist, his vision is shaped by robust and non-trivial antinomies, on which he has, simultaneously, a tragic and a comic perspective. Whether the subject is decay, man's rage for order, nature's indifference to violence, pedantic love of detail, or sudden death in an idyllic setting (“Murder in an English garden”), Greenaway has the talent to conceive of his themes as double-sided, and to sustain two contradictory insights with equal conviction.