Drowning by Numbers Rating: Sorry, this product is not currently available. Cast: Joan Plowright Bernard Hill Joely Richardson Juliet Stevenson Complete Cast (11 total)

Drowning by Numbers Reviews

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A visual and intellectual and arithmetic feast.
`Drowning By Numbers', written and directed by Peter Greenaway and released in 1987 may be the perfect refutation to Susan Sontag's claim that cinema is no longer `poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral - all at the same time' (See `The New Yorker', Sept. 12, 2005). This is not Greenaway's best-known movie. That distinction is probably owned by `The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover', although I can almost guarantee that if you liked `The Thief...', you will like `Drowning By Numbers'. In fact, I believe our current subject is easily the better movie, purely on the basis of my most important criteria, rewatchability.

When you watch a film by Bergmann or Fellini or Kurasawa, you sense there may be literary, biblical, social, and historical references scattered about in the dialogue and the `set decoration'. When you watch a Greenaway film, there is no doubt about the fact that Greenaway is playing with your mind with his dialogue, business, and visual imagery. The problem is that while some are obvious, others are delightfully subtle. The most obvious image is in numbers and counting, heralded by the title itself. The movie opens with a young girl's skipping rope to a counting off of the names of 100 stars in the night sky. The theme permeates the movie with the appearance of `most' numbers between one and one hundred printed, stitched or drawn on some piece of scenery or prop. While I have watched this movie at least four or five times, I cannot say with certainty that every number between 1 and 100 actually appears in the scenery. I have yet to see number 1, although number 100 is impossible to miss at the end of the movie. I also believe that not all the numbers appear in strict arithmetic order. Some two or three or four appear all at once, and in these situations, there is no attempt to keep them in order.

The basic plot is extremely simple. In fact, I suspect that some of the absurdities played out in the story would be totally lost if the part of the story of which you can make some sense was the least bit complicated. It is so simple, I will not recite it here.

One of the allusions made to counting is created by the presence of sheep in several scenes. The reference to counting sheep as an aid to falling asleep is not hidden, but spoken plainly enough about two thirds of the way through the movie. Greenaway builds on this by having one of the principle characters, the boy, Smut, be obsessed with counting, whether it be hairs on a dog or leaves on a tree or insects in his collection. This seeming digression wraps around to the main subject of the story when we see Smut counting deaths of animals, mostly as road kill on the local country road surrounded by both wild and domestic animals. This fascination with death Smut celebrates with amateur fireworks. I would love to connect the fireworks to some other theme in the film, but that bit of mystery is beyond me at this time.

Sheep and counting and death are also folded into the obsession of the principle make character, Madgett, Smut's father and the local coroner, who constantly creates games, mostly nonsensical games strongly reminiscent of some events in Lewis Carrol's tales of heroine Alice underground and through the looking glass. Sheep and games come together as Smut oversees an experiment to determine if sheep can detect the time at which the tides change from going out to coming in and vise versa.

If it is not clear already, Greenaway does absurdity for absurdity's sake. What he clearly does not do is nudity and sexuality for their own sake. Just as in `The Thief...', there is some nudity, but it is all used to clearly establish motives and make you sense, with the character to which the display is aimed, the strength of the emotions and corresponding actions. So, if you have no taste for absurdity or nudity in a dramatic context, then I suggest you give this film a bye.

On the other hand, if you are especially fond of some of the finer points of cinematic crafts and shotmaking, this is a film you want to see. It does not have the great enhancement of realism as done by Eisenstein and copied by Orson Wells in, for example, `Citizen Kane'. It does, however, have the lush visual inventiveness of Terry Gilliam, taken to a whole new level. It's totally baroque, as if Greenaway studied shotmaking from Peter Breughel or Herionymus Bosch.

If you see more than one Greenaway movie, you may not agree that `Drowning By Numbers' is the best, although I think the simplicity of its plot makes it a lot easier to appreciate Greenaway's visual and logical twists and turns.

Highly recommended for the cinematically adventurous.




A funny , clever and delightful black movie !
If you are not involved inside the gothic world of Greenaway , I recommend you to know his previous filmography . You can start with The belly of an architect , A zed and two noughts and The draughtman contract (watch my three reviews) .
The crewness in his female characters ; in sucesive order ; grandmother , daughter and niece who decide murder his respective husbands according the numerical rhythm from one to one hundred is told with dazzling poetry , sugestive coldness, opressive atmosphere and merciless behavior .
I love this film and certainly this is one of the three best works of this irreverent and powerful and creative film maker : le enfant terrible of the british cinema .
Somehow , Peter Greenaway signified for U.K. in the eighties what Ken Russell meant in the seventies and Joseph Losey in the sixties and early seventies .
A cult movie all the way .

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