A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)

 

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Andrea Ferreol as Alba Bewick; Brian Deacon as Oswald Deuce; Eric Deacon as Oliver Deuce; Frances Barber as Venus de Milo; Joss Ackland as Van Hoyten; Jim Davidson as Joshua Plate; Agnes Brulet as Beta Bewick; Guusje Van Tilborgh as Caterina Bolnes; Gerard Thoolen as Van Meegeren; Ken Campbell as Stephen Pipe; Wolf Kahler as Felipe Arc-en-Ciel; Geoffrey Palmer as Fallast

An Abstract Candidate

 

Is leglessness a form of contraception?

Peter Greenaway's first theatrical length film was The Falls (1980), his debut an incredible production but structured like the work he did for the Central Office of Information (COI) alongside his short films, a fake document told as a fictional catalogue using multimedia. The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) and A Zed & Two Noughts are his "first" films in terms of setting up how he would fully introduce narratives and characters alongside his obsessions. This, set up with two women dying when a swan hits their car, is a narrative first but, as mentioned, his obsessions with lists and references stays and is amplified. The grieving twin brothers, working at a zoo, are trying to rationalise this tragedy and start with an obsession with photographing decay whilst fixating on the one survivor from the crash, the female driver Alba Bewick (Andrea Ferreol), left permanently disabled as a result of the crash. It is, with a word of warning, a bleak film as a result, just in how real animal carcasses (even a dog) were acquired and are seen documented like stop motion in their decay. Thankfully, it is a film, even if you need to be willing to tackle its subject matter of death, contrasted by Greenaway's profane, perverted, joyous, libidinous, witty and profane dialogue and tone to his work.

His work is very peculiar, not just because of the subject matter, or the decision to make the leads Brian Deacon and Eric Deacon twins, predating David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988) from the era, or the small role by British comedian Jim Davidson as a zoo keeper, an odd inclusion as the former game show how and contentious un-pc stand-up comedian sticks out here at an early part of his career. It is because how, even with its ruminations on life and death, as the brothers are watching a David Attenborough documentary serial about the beginnings of life, the corpse humour and obsessions with the transgressive contrast this. It is a gleeful film at times about the bleak subject, as eccentric as they come even next to Greenaway's later work, just as much from how, whilst more sexually explicit work would come, his trademarks including the subjects of desire and lust feel even more exaggerated in context of its zoological and metaphorical themes. Whether wondering about what colour a woman's underwear is to the sex worker Venus de Milo (Frances Barber) and her erotic animal themed tales, this film has a foot in life explicitly as with death, a reoccurring trend throughout Peter Greenaway's career.

There are also the tonal choices and the other obsessions. Greenaway never left his former work with documentaries even into his veteran years, and you can go to something like The Sea in Their Blood (1983), attempting to catalogue the entirely of the British coast, their culture and centuries of existence in a short film, and you see the tone and stylistic choices stayed. It literally has a narrator listing what British coastal seaweed and Welsh lobster is edible among its ethereal score by Michael Nyman, a barrage of lists and images contrasted already by Greenaway's pitch perfect sense of humour, such as the idea that people once thought geese came from barnacles, and calling them out as "credulous". With Alba's daughter listing animals from A to Z, to the Attenborough dictionaries starting at the beginning of Charles Darwin's' theories of evolution, by microbes, and climbing upwards, Greenaway fixates on structures and lists as his narratives usually contrast to the characters themselves. They may be able to catalogue the world, but human flaws and their inability to control the worlds around them is in vast contrast. Then there are the eccentric touches, in his interest in art abruptly appearing here as well, as the surgeon working on Alba, fixated and wishing to keep her even if it means taking both legs; he is obsessed with Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and sees Alba as the ideal Vermeer woman to recreate from the canvases. Already the film has its playfulness, such as one brother in his grief releasing anything from flamingos to, on Christmas, a short sighted rhino to the anger of their boss, but Greenaway's work can be even more proudly imaginative on the subject in the vibrancy of the dialogue to the style of them.

Greenaway's style would stay with him long after cinematographer Sacha Vierny and composer Michael Nyman, huge figures in creating Greenaway's films, left but their contributions are necessary to consider with his eighties to late nineties productions equally. Vierny's work is striking here, Greenaway as a fan of his work on Last Year at Marienbad (1961), able to work with an idol on multiple films which were as much Vierny's in style as they were Greenaway's own in composition. Michael Nyman was the other clear voice, whose compositions over potentially distressing images, the decomposition of a swan, is contrasted by the life and ethereal grace of his pieces, someone who contributed so much to Peter Greenaway even if the later continued to show his talents as a director-screenwriter where the partnership separated. A Zed & Two Noughts in terms of standing out, even among its creator's other work, has many virtues; knowing this would only begin the diverse career of Peter Greenaway, who would continue from this and expand upon themes and ideas here, makes the film's virtues more pronounced, as its snail ridden ending could have been enough of a capstone to a career that never got off the ground after this, instead become one of the many images that linger in the director-writer's career that went onwards.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Meticulous

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low