Expect a film by Peter Greenaway to both offend and impress you. You
could equally be entering Greenaway's own private art gallery or the
jaws of hell. The visual detail in Greenaway's work is amazing, be it
after the style of Breughel or Bosch, although his narratives are spare
and often elliptical. He has flirted with mainstream acceptance more
than that other master of painterly, if often repellent images on film,
Derek Jarman, but has always veered away
again to the fringes of homo-erotic fantasy. Greenaway's menacing cameras
prowl past visceral images revealing a fascination with, as well as
the body and its functions, death and betrayal and their relation to
such disparate things as food, sex, crime and architecture.
The son of an ornithologist, Greenaway had begun his career appropriately
as a painter, but it was not long before he was working as a film editor
and making a string of enigmatic shorts, leading to his first feature
in 1980. The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) opened doors for him, and,
although regarded as too puzzling in some quarters, was a conspicuous
arthouse success that also reached the edges of a more general audience.
He had less success over the next few years until Drowning
by Numbers (1988) and, most notably, The
Cook, the Thief, His Wife and her Lover (1989) brought him back
to the fore.
Both are greatly aided by the colour images of Greenaway's regular
cinematographer Sacha Vierney. Drowning is almost a series of moving
paintings that depict three women from the same family who all drown
their husbands. As usual, artificiality reigns, and Greenaway lingers
too long in the telling of the tale, but the film remains fascinating
throughout. And the presence of 'name' stars undoubtedly enabled both
it and The Cook to prove more accessible to audiences on either side
of the Atlantic. The latter was undoubtedly among the most stylish and
the most disgusting of its year. Vulgarity is its keynote and no opportunity
is missed to underline it, from the continuous sex and violence, to
the crass opulence of the restaurant where revolting gangster Michael
Gambon holds court. Greenaway has searched in vain for its equal
since, his more recent pictures lacking the pictorial inspiration which
a Greenaway film once guaranteed.
