From its opening moments, of a girl jumping rope while counting and naming the stars in the nighttime sky, Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers is perhaps the most direct illustration of the filmmaker’s key thematic and aesthetic interest in ascribing structure to a chaotic universe. Throughout, the film slowly counts from one to 100 via a combination of character dialogue and visual markers sprinkled in frames like an elaborate game of I Spy. In deadpan voiceovers, a young boy also elaborates the byzantine rules of made-up games whose goals seem altogether too banal to be worth their complexity.
The plot that strings together these playful games involves three women, each named Cissie Colpitts, who drown their husbands and enlist the help of a coroner, Madgett (Bernard Hill), to cover up the crimes. In a relatively light preamble to the darker feminist revenge drama of Greenaway’s subsequent The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover...
The plot that strings together these playful games involves three women, each named Cissie Colpitts, who drown their husbands and enlist the help of a coroner, Madgett (Bernard Hill), to cover up the crimes. In a relatively light preamble to the darker feminist revenge drama of Greenaway’s subsequent The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover...
- 5/1/2023
- by Jake Cole
- Slant Magazine
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