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Drowning by Numbers
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Severin Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (9th June 2023). |
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The Film
 Palme d'Or: Peter Greenaway (nominee) and Best Artistic Contribution: Peter Greenaway (winner) - Cannes Film Festival, 1988 "Mothers have a lot to answer for." On the night of her birthday, Cissie Colpitts (Widow's Peak's Joan Plowright) discovers her husband Jake (Brazil's Bryan Pringle) sharing a drunken bath with local schoolteacher Nancy (The Rainbow's Jane Gurnett). When Nancy passes out, Cissie nonchalantly drowns Jake in his own bathwater and then informs her daughter Cissie 2 (Truly Madly Deeply's Juliet Stevenson) and Olympic swimming hopeful niece Cissie 3 (Lady Chatterley's Joely Richardson) of the act before recruiting them into helping her move Nancy back to her own bed and to gang up on libidinous local coroner Madgett (Gandhi's Bernard Hill) to determine a cause of death for her husband that is favorable to her innocence. While it is very believable that drunken Jake might have suffered a heart attack during his bath, not all are convinced: there's Nancy for one, then there's Jake's twin cousins Jonah (Salome's Last Dance's Kenny Ireland) and Moses (A Fish Called Wanda's Michael Percival), and even Cissie 3's non-swimming plumber fiance Bellamy (Basic Instinct 2's David Morrissey) has his suspicions of which she tries to disabuse him with sex. Further undermining the trio's version of events is Madgett's son Smut (Jason Edwards) who meticulously counts, photographically documents, and celebrates all of the seaside town's violent deaths (human, animal, or insect) which all tend to occur on Tuesdays and Fridays. While Cissie gently fends off Madgett's advances in the interest of not raising suspicions, Cissie 2 drowns her impotent writer husband Hardy (A Quiet Passion's Trevor Cooper) and his typewriter. Although Cissie 2's story of an accidental drowning Hardy had nearly drowned not long before during the party he threw for Cissie 3's and Bellamy's nuptials is initially supported by the witness testimony of twin runners by the name of Van Dyke (Kingdom of Heaven's Michael Fitzgerald and Quills' Edward Tudor-Pole), they too eventually become part of the "water tower conspiracy" whose covert meetings the Cissies observe following each of the funerals. In spite of the pressure Madgett feels about his verdicts from public scrutiny and his mounting sexual frustration with a trio of women who have "have no prerogative on drowning," Cissie 3 may just have convinced Bellamy of the likelihood of coincidence when she decides to entice him with sex into a swimming lesson since, after all, drowning "like most things come in threes." A seminal work in the filmography at least, the feature-length filmography of Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman's Contract), Drowning by Numbers combines his approach to art-infused plots of sex and death with his increasingly "art installation" approach to film as graphic art. The plot of the film connects a series of byzantine compositions of landscape and dιcor in which the characters are arranged, moving not like game pieces but having their actions determined by a schema unknown to them until they act upon it (the title can be likened to painting by numbers with the numbering sequence seen in each and every shot either as physical number or the number of certain objects). In the 1988 documentary piece on the film "Fear of Drowning" co-directed by Greenaway and actor Vanni Corbellini who has a cameo in the film and had appeared the prior year in Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect Greenaway notes that each drowning is committed with "less and less motive" but "more and more conviction," and this is evidenced in Cissie 1's detachment in her murder, Cissie 2 almost letting Hardy drown on his own before deciding to leave their home's veranda, cross the beach, and jump in to finish the job at the risk of being seen, and Cissie 3's desire to be both a mother and an Olympic diver with only the vaguest reference to some sort of "lechery" on Bellamy's part.  The film depicts the same scenario three times in which the similarities outweigh the variations, most of which are personified by Madgett's attempted seduction of all three women separately and how far each lets him get while the increasingly complex rules he makes up for games seem like a means of assuaging his wounded manhood, wresting back control by almost coercing the involvement of others into them. Madgett too seems to move within a set of rules explained in narration by Smut who ultimately closes a circle began by another child (The Jungle Book's Natalie Morse) first seen skipping rope while counting and naming one hundred stars in the sky with a game, the object of which is "to punish those who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish actions" which includes in their number the counter-conspirators who have committed a hit-and-run, Madgett, and even the trio of women who promise Madgett that they will look after Smut ignorant of their role in his unhappiness and oblivious to what death he is celebrating as they view the fireworks from the boat with their intended non-swimming victim. Greenaway's filmography from this point on would become increasingly "playful" and graphical from this point on, especially once his British film and television funding was further supplemented by funding bodies in Holland and Japan with early high definition technology allowing him to further blur the boundaries between moving images, text, and graphic art as seen in films like Prospero's Books, The Pillow Book, and his lesser-seen Tulse Luper cycle.
Video
Although released theatrically in the United States by Miramax in 1991 and to laserdisc and VHS the following year from Live Home Video, Drowning by Numbers never had a DVD release stateside, and the early imports including co-producer/UK distributor Film Four's DVD utilized a semi-letterboxed, poor-looking video master while a newer German DVD featured a 1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen master but from an NTSC source. The first HD remaster turned up in the UK in 2015 from Mediumrare which was a nice improvement over the earlier master but still soft and a little pale compared to Severin Films' 4K remaster as represented by their DolbyVision 2160p24 HEVC 1.66:1 widescreen 4K UltraHD and their 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray in which the photography of Sacha Vierny (Last Year in Marienbad) in the first of his collaborations with Greenaway looks truly luminous, lending a tactile feeling to close-ups of faces and inserts of details, overall enhanced detail to the busy compositions, and popping the saturated colors from a washtub full of apples in the opening to Cissie 3's bathing suit near the end that looked comparatively sedate and recessed within the shots of the earlier master. Grain sometimes appears to fight with minor blocking in the skies of some of the landscape shots (which observe the rule of thirds in composition with the sky taking up two-thirds of the frame) but this is definitely the best the film has looked on physical media. 
Audio
The Dolby Stereo mix is rendered as a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track with clear dialogue and sound design that is more atmospheric than directional and mostly dominated by the scoring of Greenaway regular Michael Nyman (The Piano). Optional English SDH subtitles are included.
Extras
The 4K UltraHD release is a combo a Blu-ray-only edition is also available features on both UltraHD disc and Blu-ray disc the film's theatrical trailer (2:19) and a new audio commentary by writer/director Peter Greenaway in which Greenaway notes that the film was his last film made while he was still living in England before his move to Holland, and he points out various autobiographical touches and references buried in the dialogue and the images. He reveals that certain characters are named after the apocryphal recorded last words of famous people Bellamy after Prime Minister Pitt's "I think I could eat one of Bellamy's pork pies" and Nancy after Charles the Second's "and take good care of Nelly" that the skipping girl is modeled on one of Velαzquez's meninas, the contributions of Vierny and Nyman, and the importance of the number three in the overall numbering scheme among other topics.  The rest of the extras are included on the Blu-ray disc only, starting with a new Greenaway interview "Painting by Numbers" (14:28) in which he stresses the primacy of image over text I filmmaking while also pointing out the requirement of text to obtain funding for a film in the first place the film's themes of water and death, and the film as an attempt to recreate the landscape of his youth. "Three Women and a Coroner" (9:53) is an interview with actor Hill who recalls Greenaway's place in the British film industry during the period, the trust actors had in him to do nude and sex scenes, how he did not realize at the time that the numbering scheme also included numbers of objects including supposedly one hundred Ms in the set created for Madgett's bedroom/study and noting that Greenaway positioned his actors within compositions at the start of shots but let them improvise their own blocking from that point on. The aformentioned 1988 documentary "Fear of Drowning" (27:15) suggests that Greenaway and/or the film's producers were aware that such a work might need a guide or index that touches upon the various themes and plot elements, the references to various painters of the English landscape, and the inspirations for various compositions, including the overlaying of images that also conveniently cover up some nudity. It is a very helpful piece best watched in between initial and repeat viewings. The disc also includes "Some Greenaway Game Concepts" (5:29), a storyboard gallery of images illustrating some of the games within. Due to an authoring error on the Blu-ray, selecting the commentary from the special features menu instead calls up this video piece (the commentary is accessible from the setup menu and via the remote control audio button during playback of the feature). 
Overall
A seminal work in the feature-length filmography of Peter Greenaway, Drowning by Numbers combines his approach to art-infused plots of sex and death with his increasingly "art installation" approach to film as graphic art.
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