Freak Show

It's always an adventure watching Peter Greenaway films. He does one thing that nearly no other director does. He films nudity without eroticism. Even the films that ostensibly have love as subjects, like Pillow Book, are not at all about eroticism. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover is about love as an escape from an overbearing thief.

Greenaway loves the contrast of prim and proper with, well, whatever is the opposite of prim and proper. All his films have its share of nudity, but often, in the oddest setting. The characters keep blabbering on even as they get unclothed, and there's a strange feeling that, by god, these are naked folks. There's a series of photo books which basically are people clothed on one side, and unclothed on the other. It really brings home the point of "naked underneath one's clothing".

A Zed and Two Noughts is one of Greenaway's "earlier" films (he's been making films for over forty years, so it's not so early) made in 1985. The film it most reminds me of is David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. Both are films about twins. However, A Zed and Two Noughts is about grief. Or at least, that's one of the many subjects it attempts to deal with.

Early on, there's an accident. One woman dies (the wife of one of the twins). Another loses a leg. As a kind of grief treatment, one of the twins begins filming things in decay, using time-lapsed photography. There's also some deal with black and white animals, most particularly, a zebra (pronounced through out the film, except in one spot, as "Zeb-bra" rather than "Zee-bra").

Throughout the film, I was thinking of how a zoo is a place for animals to be put on showcase, but it's not so far removed from a freak show, where you put people on display, and there's a sense of that happening as well. Once you lose a limb, you become something of a freak. After a while, the film reveals the twins were once Siamese, and were something of a freak.

Zed also deals with life and death, often showing snails writhing around. Greenaway knows how to push buttons when it comes to showing mildly cringeworthy scenes.

He juxtaposes such scenes with these oddly mannered settings. Many of the scenes are in the one-legged woman's bedroom (eventually, no-legged, when she decides to get the other leg cut off), with her huge windows behind her, curtains flowing, and one twin on one side, and the other on the other side.

A Zed and Two Noughts is also an odd way of looking at the word "Zoo". I had heard the title for many years, but it never crossed my mind that he was referring to a zoo. But it also suggests things like "Z", the last letter of the alphabet (the end) and two noughts as two nothings, in this case, perhaps the two twins (the woman even says it late in the movie, they are a zed and two noughts). Greenaway must revel in the cleverness of the name and its double, possibly triple meaning.

There's also one other particularly Greenaway-esque touch beyond the obvious use of non-erotic nudity, and that is the music. Michael Nyman composes Greenaway's films, and has an odd bleating style of music that overlays what's being seen. The music really plays a heavy role. The only other music Greenaway likes in his film are songs from the 40s or so. Two songs are used in this film, and there's one song played in heavy rotation in Pillow Book.

Even though I found the film difficult to grasp (there's an older guy who hangs out with another woman, and another amputee in the film, then the little girl who wants to start her own zoo, then the doctor who wants to do the amputations, and have relations with the women he meets), it was still oddly compelling, filled with an odd display of grief.

I should watch The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover again, though that is more highly mannered than this film, set almost entirely in the museum-like restaurant, and a library, about a woman who finally decides she needs out of an oppressive relationship and finds a bookish man to be her lover, a complete contrast to the bombastic thief, just to see what that's like. I haven't seen that in over 15 years.

Greenaway begins to toss more visuals in his later films, his scene within a scene, the heavy use of calligraphy.

He's also fond of numbers, letters and patterns. For example, in Drowning by Numbers, the numbers 1 through 100 (I think) are spoken throughout the film. In A Zed and Two Noughts, a little girl says the name of animals from A to Zed (though there's none for "X" as she points out).

It's said that Greenaway makes films like no one else, and really, no one seems to copy his style. His lack of accessbility tends to mean tiny audiences, but they're large enough that he continues to make films. I want to catch up with a few more, in particular, the Tulse Luper Suitcases. I should be getting The Falls, which is from the last 70s and said to be one of his "best".

You have to say you really like film if you like Greenaway, mostly because his films are challenging. You don't really "like" the characters, and there's a total sense of strangeness, even as people are going about their business of living.