Drowning by Numbers (1988)

Such an obviously non-American film. I believe this was the first time I had seen Joan Plowright, and she was so good. Having seen more of her work since, I know this is no fluke. Everyone else was also good here, especially Joely Richardson and Bernard Hill. I won't go into any detail, but the movie is weird, weird, weird, and has a dark subject matter without being a dark film. Highly recommended for those looking for something different. Grade: A

Fmovies: This is a picture that offers so much to the viewer. It is beautiful, but also, at times, grotesque. It is intriguing and complex, and covers a cornucopia of subjects. The film has an elegant Englishness about it. It is a film that always requires your attention and one that you will want to return to.

The film begins with a young girl (adorned in a dress from Velazquez's painting Las Meninas) who is skipping and counting stars, 100 of them (some of these stars have Greenaway names like Hoyten, Luper and Spica). She is the film's navigator.

The story is about three women, all with the same name, Cissie Colpitts, each from different age groups, who have something in common, they each murder their husbands by drowning them. They escape punishment from this by consenting to the needs of an amorous coroner, Madgett. Madgett's young son, Smut, tells us about different games, each of them rather odd. The film has a wonderful surreal feel to it. For instance, a man and a woman on bicycles collide with two dead cows, but it hardly perturbs them. Throughout the film there are the numbers 1 to 100 placed in ascending order on display in some peculiar positions. It's a fascinating riddle.

I saw the movie at a local art-house cinema, and was instantly converted to the church of Greenaway/Nyman. I raved so much about it that my philestine friends finally agreed to rent it.

Of course, the rented version was pan-n-scanned. It was truly awful. As bad as the original was good. Much of the Greenawaynian charm is his flair for composing scenes visually. Pan-scanning deprives you of almost all the fun. Besides whoever did the pan scanning didn't get the spot-the-numbers game. Several were lost out of frame.

Don't bother renting it on VHS. Maybe the DVD will get it right. Until then, ask the Brattle or your local cinema paradiso to show you it in all its glory.

Drowning by Numbers fmovies. Life's a game, death's a game. This playful little movie is all about games. If you're not a gaming-type person, you might not find this, umm, diverting.

The thoroughly surreal and tongue-in-cheek tone of the movie keeps us from taking it very seriously...all of which is for the best, since that way we don't confuse the plot with serious drama; the games the women play tend toward the homicidal....

Wittgenstein famously pointed out that there are all manner of games in the world--there's no tight set of identifying characteristics; games all have, at most, a "family resemblance". Greenaway has here collected numerous far-flung relatives in this odd family. You'll no doubt appreciate some of them more than others, Well, we all inevitably have favorites.

DbN and Prospero's Books (two very different movies!) are my favorite Greenaway films.

Not much I can add to the rave reviews above. A simple-complicated-ugly-beautiful-puzzle-painting of a film, which demands repeated viewings.

"Drowning" is not for everyone - but look at the breakdown on that voting. As I write this, this film got more "10"s than any other number.

I'm not into lists, but if you forced me, this would be my number one.

Go see (or rather go buy). If you've seen it before, see it again - new layers reveal themselves even now.

Drowning By Numbers is one of a very small group of perfect films I've seen. Not just 5, 10, 100 point films, but flawless to the point where numerical systems fail to be valuable. Peter Greenaway's third film is about three women a mother, daughter, and niece all named Cissie Colpitts, who one by one drown their husbands in a bath, in the sea, and in a pool. After the first drowning, the local coroner is asked to help cover up the crime, and he agrees believing this will give him car blanche to have his way with the new widow. He is rebuked in the first of several such attempts. His name is Madgett and he orchestrates for the town a series of seemingly random, perhaps ancient (in fact completely made up) games, consisting of strange rules and regulations, like "Hangman's Cricket" where half the game is spent learning the rules. Madgett's son is named Smut(our narrator), and Smut is interested in a young girl dressed in a fancy gown who always claims to be on her way to a party, and who jumps rope counting from 1 to 100 in the films opening sequence. Numbers appear in every scene whether spoken aloud or written on a small or large object in the background. One could make the film itself into a game called "spot the numbers", which count from the first scene to the last from 1 to 100. The film is full of small details some so obscure they are likely to please no one but Peter Greenaway or those willing to watch his behind the scenes blow-by blow "Fear Of Drowning", where for instance, we learn that many lines of dialog consist of the last words of England's kings, sometimes crazed non-sequitters muttered from their death beds. Why include such things, because it makes the game for fun, that's why. As always Greenaway composes every single sequence to achieve a sense of balance, and painterly poise. As usual most scenes, including idle landscape shots are recreations of paintings. Though the images are fantastic, the soundtrack by frequent collaborator Michael Nyman is stunning. I can't think of a director and composer whose works fuse together with such iconoclastic fluid grace since Sergio Leone and Ennio Mariconne. Nyyman's orchestral compositions are energetic, pulsating, lively, and captivating enough to be listened to and enjoyed apart from the film as its own music, and gives a sharp sense of irony and comic timing of its own to Greenaway's visual tableaux. Greenaway is not what you would call a "humanist" director, he rarely shoots close ups, instead remains in wide screen, and letting his characters take up positions as figures in an image, not actors on a stage, or in a film. This can be difficult to deal with if identification with characters is a pre-requisite for enjoyment, because the film aims for visual awe, wafts of aural pleasure, and snatches of witty literate dialog that only doesn't sound like dialog because of the casual delivery the lead actresses are able to give their macabre melodrama. Drowning By Numbers is a multi-layered film meant to be watched several times.

It is a monument to be marveled at, but one where all of the elements of the film medium contribute the structure and design of the piece as whole, where form and content perfectly integrated into each other. The women who drown their husbands, at first do it out of anger, then out of disappointment, and finally out of "solidarity", or in other words for no real reason at all. The pattern of threes needs to be complete, three murders, three autopsies, and