DROWNING BY NUMBERS Movie Review

A coroner named Henry Madgett (Bernard Hill) is startled to discover that three male drowning victims were all married to three generations of women who are all named Cissie Colpitts (Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, and Joely Richardson). The coroner—who has a dead-bug and dead-animal collecting son named Smut—agrees to keep quiet in exchange for an “arrangement” with the ladies. While all of this is taking place within the confines of writer/director Peter Greenaway's ostensible plot, another story is being told within the images themselves; the numbers 1 through 100 appear on screen—sequentially—during the course of Drowning by Numbers, and sometimes they show up in the strangest places. You'll see them on key chains, trees, clocks, and cows, but what they add up to is anybody's guess. As is always the case with Greenaway's films, the cinematography is both lushly beautiful and stubbornly enigmatic, but then again so are the movies themselves. I rather like Drowning by Numbers; as much of a puzzle as it is, it's somehow one of Greenaway's most pleasantly annoying achievements.

NEXT STOP … The Falls, The Draughtsman's Contract, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

1987 (R) 121m/C GB Bernard Hill, Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, Joely Richardson; D: Peter Greenaway; W: Peter Greenaway; C: Sacha Vierny; M: Michael Nyman.VHS, LV ART