Shooting Down Pictures

Karina Longworth is the editor of SpoutBlog. Her writing has also appeared in FILMMAKER Magazine, The Huffington Post, Netscape, NewTeeVee, The Raw Story and TV Squad.

screeened July 1, 2008 on Zeitgeist DVD in New York NY

TSPDT rank #852 IMDb Wiki

Peter Greenaway launched into the vanguard of 80s Brit cinema with this BFI-funded arthouse landmark. Dressing an oblique murder mystery-cum political allegory narrative with gorgeous cinematography, elaborate declamatory wordplay and costumed sexual naughtiness, the film packages numerous art cinema conventions with a sumptuous obliqueness that almost guarantees repeat visits to puzzle over it the more. The film is most notable for its ambivalent treatment of its protagonist Neville, a painter commissioned by a landowner’s wife to create drawings of the estate (though it’s really an excuse for her to sleep with him). Artist, charlatan, lothario and subversive, Neville embodies several variations of the arthouse film iconoclast hero at once, and yet Greenaway repeatedly undermines his heroic qualities to reveal him as a pawn in the larger game being played. The film owes much to 1960s puzzlers like Blow Up or Last Year in Marienbad, while distinguishing itself through an impeccable tableaux of painterly flatness (concealing layers of intrigue) and a flippancy towards its subjects that reveals the juvenile disposition of the characters, or the director, or both.

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