| Overall Grade: |
A+ |
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| Story: |
A |
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| Acting: |
A |
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| Direction: |
A+ |
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| Visuals: |
A+ |
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Greenaway at his caustic, esoteric best
by Ben (movies profile)
Sep 30, 2009
Peter Greenaway's oeuvre is made up of movies fixated on the myriad aspects of death, the relationship between the physical body and the tangible world, and the cosmic irony of life. He approaches these topics in a roundabout way, injecting his films with patterns as structuring devices that move the films along in a way that is equally important as the plot.
This movie is ostensibly about the fictional architect Stourley Kracklite, an American who travels to Rome to curate an exhibit on the work of the real architect Boulee, whose work exists mostly in the form of his drawings. The plot consists of a slow progression into adultery, pessimism, stomach cancer, and ultimately death, but the real magic of the film (as is typical to Greenaway's work) is the framing of the linear route of the film with arcane information regarding gravity, Roman history, and gastrological conditions.
If all of this sounds even remotely fascinating, add to the equation an amazing minimalist soundtrack by Wim Mertens and an engrossing performance by Brian Dennehy, and you have, in my opinion, one of the strongest movies in Greenaway's repetoire. I strongly recommend "A Zed and Two Noughts" as well, but only if you enjoyed this movie. Greenaway requires a specific type of viewing; one that requires a suspension of typical instincts that we associate with movies. He's somewhat of a meta-filmmaker, in that his philosophy is centered around acknowledging film's artifice and revealing stories by how they are told rather than what they are telling. |
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