Jonathan Rosenbaum: on Peter Greenaway
Greenaway’s obsessive reliance on structural systems — perspective (The Draughtsman’s Contract), the alphabet (A Zed & Two Noughts), numbers (Drowning by Numbers), and color-coding here — never functions as a means of exploration or discovery in the way that (for instance) the systems in Michael Snow’s experimental “structural films” like Wavelength, Back and Forth, and La Region Centrale do; they suggest the somewhat desperate tactics of a control freak who doesn’t really believe in or feel comfortable with narrative, but has to use it anyway to get his pictures financed and shown. They become, in effect, recipes for filming by numbers.
One can still enjoy Greenaway’s sarcasm and aesthetic eccentricity up to a point, if only because his intelligence, his art-history background, and his craft all provide a certain novelty in the art-film terrain that he has claimed since The Draughtsman’s Contract. That film had a pleasurable puzzlelike aspect and an intriguingly grim view of art patronage that fit in nicely with the handsome visuals and the cruel eroticism and wit, even if the laughter that greeted its showings often had an ugly and dehumanized sound to it. I got even more kicks out of A Zed & Two Noughts, my favorite Greenaway film, because of the sheer perversity, beauty, and complexity of its multifaceted conception. But I walked out of The Belly of an Architect, bored silly by the symmetrical center-framing and the turgidity of Greenaway’s preoccupation with midlife sexual crises, and even though I stayed to the end of Drowning by Numbers, I was just as bored by the mechanical jokes, conceits, and cruelties that made up the bulk of that film.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is in no way inferior to these last two films, though it’s highly likely that one’s attitude toward it will be determined by how many times one has already ridden through Greenaway’s narrow and maliciously nuanced structural exercises. If you would enjoy a sadistic filmmaker calling you a cannibal for sitting through two hours of attractively framed nastiness and abuse, you might find this picture to be right up your alley.
Greenaway’s frozen and aristocratic sense of irony — a major part of his equipment, and my major bone of contention — puts quotation marks around virtually everything that we see and hear; but without a context for this irony, we wind up responding to it as if it were a wallpaper pattern rather than an existential position, a dandified form of decoration that is too willful to be very funny, much less witty. If Greenaway were producing only wallpaper, I’d have no reason for complaint; by the same token, if making movies were a matter of academic achievement — showing how well he’s learned his lessons — I’d give him an A plus. Sergei Eisenstein once quipped of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, “It’s a good PhD thesis” — quite unfairly, in my opinion, because that film has both an emotional directness and an academic clunkiness that his remark overlooked, the precise opposite of what Greenaway has to offer. I couldn’t call The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover a good PhD thesis because it has nothing serious to prove, but I wouldn’t hesitate to admit that it’s immaculately researched, conscientiously footnoted, and perfectly typed.
