Drawing Things Out

Film: The Draughtsman’s Contract
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

It wouldn’t be an overstatement to suggest that The Draughtsman’s Contract had an uphill struggle in getting me to appreciate it. The reason is that I haven’t fully come to trust Peter Greenaway as a director. I didn’t much love The Pillow Book and while I liked Drowning by Numbers, I didn’t like it a lot. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was visually interesting but ultimately fairly disgusting in a lot of respects. The common thread of those three films is sex (albeit less so in Drowning by Numbers). We aren’t going to stray very far from this topic in The Draughtsman’s Contract, either.

I liked this one, though. I liked it more than I’ve liked any of Greenaway’s other films, and by a pretty good distance. The reason for this is simple: this is a very clever film. A secondary, but just as important reason is that while a great deal of the surface focus is on sex, the sex here is legitimately a red herring for what is really going on. It’s there specifically to draw our attention to the prurience of what is happening and distract us from the larger story that is being told. It’s not often that a film this thoroughly surprises me in this way.

Skin on Skin

Film: The Pillow Book
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I’m beginning to think that Peter Greenaway is something of a creep. The Pillow Book is the third of his films that I have seen, and there’s something disturbingly sensual about his work. I don’t mean that his work is specifically erotic, although some of it is. I mean that how he chooses his particular sensuality is specifically off-kilter. Of the three I’ve seen (and there’s a fourth one coming soon), The Pillow Book is the most specifically sexually-charged and erotic, the most physically sensual and decadent rather than simply involving a lot of sex. The problem is a big one, though: it explores the depths of a sexual kink that I don’t think actually exists for real. Maybe I’m naïve. In truth there are probably entire websites devoted to this particular sexual proclivity. What the hell do I know?

Nagiko (played as an adult by Vivian Wu) had a father who was a writer. For good luck, he would write characters on her face in calligraphy. Her aunt would read to her out of the original Pillow Book, an ancient text that was a diary of observations. Nagiko will have a connection to this diary throughout her life. We learn that her father is forced to provide sexual favors to his publisher (Yoshi Oida) in order to get his work published at all.

Down for the Third Time

Film: Drowning by Numbers
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on rockin’ flatscreen.

Peter Greenaway is a director I have trouble understanding in some respects. I mean, I think I get his films in large part, but his oeuvre is a collage of seemingly disparate elements sewn into a whole. There’s a part of his work that is reminiscent of a director like Oshima—it’s blatantly sexual and earthy, with much of the plot being driven forward by sensual desires and actions, often in what would best be called non-traditional places. There’s also a large piece of his work that touches on the body horror of a director like Cronenberg. The difference is that Greenaway’s work is set more closely in the real world rather than science fiction or horror, and the body horrors that crop up are those that might actually happen, or at least could happen. It was true of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and it’s true of Drowning by Numbers.

At least two of the words in the title of Drowning by Numbers are incredibly appropriate. Three people drown in the film, and the numbers from one to 100 appear in the film at some point. The story concerns a trio of women—grandmother, mother, and daughter, all named Cissie Colpitts (played by Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, and Joely Richardson, respectively). In turn, starting from eldest to youngest, the three women drown their husbands and then coerce the local coroner Madgett (Bernard Hill) into helping them cover up the crime. For his part, Madgett is attracted to all three Cissie Colipittses, resulting in something not unlike the Three Billy Goats Gruff, where Madgett is promised something more and more wonderful each time he helps suppress the evidence of a deadly crime.

Revenge Served Basted with Shallots and Chanterelles

Film: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Sometimes after I watch a film like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, I head over to IMDB and look at the parents’ guide just to see what it says. All I knew going into this one was that it started life with an X rating, which was eventually changed to the functionally equivalent NC-17. Oh, and I guess I knew that Helen Mirren is in it along with Michael Gambon, who is better known these days as the guy who took over for Dumbledore.

Anyway, I’m going to jump right into this one with both feet, and while there are a number of people in this film, I’m going to focus on the four in the title. We have a cook named Richard Borst (Richard Bohringer), who is renowned as a great chef and runs a very fancy restaurant. His partner in the restaurant is the thief, Albert Spica (Gambon), who is an absolute pig of a human being. In many ways, he is the most distasteful character I have ever seen in a film. He is loud, stupid, arrogant, mean, violent, and acts like a spoiled child. He is abusive of everyone around him, his wife Georgina (Mirren) in particular. And then there is the quiet, shy bookseller named Michael (Alan Howard). He eats in the restaurant pretty much every night.

Albert is such a complete bastard that Georgina spends a lot of time away from him, or at least as much as she can get away with. During one of her trips to the bathroom, she encounters Michael, and the two of them immediately begin having an affair. Their affair consists of trysts in the bathroom and in the kitchen with the full knowledge and observation of the kitchen staff. There’s plenty of full frontal here of both actors, and the sex is quick and almost ravenous—ravenous because of the passion and quick because it occurs in moments when Georgina is supposed to be using the bathroom.

Regardless, eventually the couple is found out and Albert goes into a rage. The two lovers are secreted out of the restaurant in an extremely disgusting manner and take up residence in the bookseller’s shop. The rest of the film is all about Albert finding out where they are, enacting his revenge, and then Georgina turning the tables on him. Go go gadget spoiler!

*** HERE’S YOUR MENU ***

So Albert discovers that food is being taken to the pair by the restaurant, particularly by a young boy called Pup (Paul Russell) who washes dishes in the kitchen and sings liturgical music. Albert captures the boy and tortures him, sending him to the hospital, but discovers the location of the lovers because of the address printed on the inside of one of the books the boy borrows. Georgina goes to visit the boy in the hospital, and while this happens, Albert and his goons move in and kill Michael by force feeding him one of his books.

Eventually, Georgina returns and finds the destruction. She convinces the cook to, well, practice his craft on the body of Michael. He does—he cooks the body. The whole body. This is then served to Albert, who is forced to begin eating it. When he does, Georgina shoots him in the head, and the film ends.

*** CHECK PLEASE ***

This is a brutal film. The sex is particularly unsexy regardless of the shapeliness of Helen Mirren’s circa 1989 backside. In any other movie, the sex and nudity would be the centerpiece of the film, but here, it takes a back seat to virtually everything else. The sex is not the extreme behavior here—instead, it is Albert’s behavior that is consistently and constantly shocking because of its extreme vulgarity. A great deal is unexplained, or at least not understood by me. I don’t know why the boy sings constantly, except perhaps as a counterpoint to the vulgarity. I don’t know why there’s a guy in the kitchen who appears to wear nothing but an apron. I don't know why the kitchen is the size of a warehouse with tables spread about it. The stress on vulgarity does explain why a man is coated in dog feces and then urinated on in the first five minutes, and it explains why Albert forces the kitchen boy to watch him rape Georgina. It explains Albert’s dinner conversation and dinner companions (who include Tim Roth), too.

The art direction on this film is worth noting. Each of the parts of the restaurant is of a different predominant color. The exterior is blue, the kitchen is green, the restaurant itself red, and the bathroom is white. Characters have their costumes change all or in part as they move from one place to the next. Georgina gets up from the table wearing a red dress and appears in the bathroom in a white one. Her clothes were evidently made by Gaultier, and they are quite fashionable. Each of the sets is pretty amazing—the film looks very much like a painting.

I have heard that this film is a metaphor for the Thatcher administration. The cook evidently represents the long-suffering loyal British citizenry. The thief is Thatcher herself, conferring her attention and favors on the wealthy without regard to the rest of the country (or the patrons in the restaurant). The wife is Britain herself, raped and abused by the vicious and cruel master. And the lover represents the British liberal elite, romanced by the spirit of the country and eventually crushed by, as Rik from The Young Ones used to say, the “fascist Thatcheristic junta.”

It works as a metaphor. And it has to. The events on the screen are so repugnant that the only way to bear it is by seeing it as a metaphor for something. This is an uncompromising film and difficult to watch, but very much worth seeing, if only for the amazing visual appeal.

Why to watch The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover: It’s art directed out the ass.
Why not to watch: It takes mincing baby steps toward Salo territory.