What happens in it? To describe its events is easy, to comprehend them is difficult. Three woman, all named Cissie Colpitts, and played by the splendid trio of Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson, drown their husbands. They get away with their crimes because each one has a special relationship with the district coroner, who would rather stay in bed than muck about with an investigation. Meanwhile, the numbers from 1 to 100 appear in sequence in the film, sometimes where you would expect them, sometimes not - as when dead cows in a field are painted with tidy white numbers - 78 and 79, as I recall.
What does this mean? Who can possibly say? “Drowning by Numbers” was made by Greenaway before his celebrated film “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover,” but is being released afterward.
If you enjoyed that film (if “enjoyed” is the word - and it was with me), then it is still impossible to say if you will enjoy this one.
Each of his films seems unique and without precedent, linked only by his love for obscure symbolic systems that probably serve no purpose except to provide his films with an apparent form that they really lack.
The first Greenaway film to make an impact was “The Draughtsman’s Contract,” which baffled audiences but did not displease them. That was the one, you will recall, with the living statues in the garden, the elaborate painting on the easel, and the figures who appeared and disappeared from the painting and the landscape. His newest film, a version of “The Tempest” named “Prospero’s Books,” was scheduled to premiere in the just-concluded Cannes Film Festival, but wasn’t finished on time. A 25-minute segment, however, was shown one afternoon, and applauded by some as the best film in the festival.
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