There’s no brief but adequate way to describe Drowning By Numbers. The movie’s composition is based on the numbers 1 through 100 because, as the Skipping Girl explains in the film’s opening sequence, “once you’ve counted one hundred all the other hundreds are the same.” So, within the movie there’s this game element at work whereby you try to spot all the numerals as they pass and when you finally see the number 100 you know the movie’s over. Story? There are these three women: a grandmother, a daughter and a granddaughter. Each is named Cissie Colpitts. Each, also in turn, drowns her respective husband and turns to the local coroner Madgett to help disguise the misdeeds as natural occurrences. Madgett has a 13-year-old son named Smut who’s an obsessive game player like his father. Of most any director I can think of, Greenaway is the eager inheritor of the structuralist film tradition and his use of Sacha Vierny (Last Year at Marienbad) as his constant cinematographer helps set a meticulous visual style. Also Drowning By Numbers consciously derives much of its visual look from the English tradition of landscape painting. I react badly to Greenaway’s approach, finding it contemptuous of its audience and reductively self-reflexive. But let me hasten to add that Greenaway also has his champions who find his work humor-filled, luxurious and endlessly intriguing. Certainly no one else matches his ability to make a spectacle out of rot and decay or to turn sex scenes into ugly fornications. I would also charge Drowning By Numbers with being the most misogynistic movie I’ve seen in many a moon cycle, were it not for Greenaway’s clear revulsion for men as well. Drowning By Numbers is no sunken treasure.
This article appears in April 28 • 2000.
