Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

The Draughtsman's Contract/A Zed & Two Noughts (Thu.-Fri., Nov. 29-30, 7 p.m., $7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 866-468-7619, ihousephilly.org) In recent years, Peter Greenaway has vanished so thoroughly into self-willed obscurity that it's hard to remember he was once discussed with the attentiveness that contemporary scholars of gnomic, overstuffed cinema lavish on Guy Maddin. Dating back to the dawn of Greenaway's feature film career, The Draughtman's Contract (1982) and A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) are clockwork contraptions encrusted with weighty ideas and sumptuous tableaux, a feast for the eyes and a puzzle for the head.

Fittingly set in the baroque era (November 1694, to be precise), Contract nests Greenaway's aesthetic and intellectual concerns within a relatively intelligible story. Neville (Anthony Higgins) is a sketch artist of considerable talent and even more considerable ego. Asked by a wealthy landowner's wife (Janet Suzman) to produce a dozen drawings of her sprawling estate, Neville agrees, but only on the condition of the total submission of the house and its mistress to his will. Using a gridlike contraption to break reality into manageable squares, Neville renders his vistas with impeccable precision, but their meaning increasingly eludes his control. Stray details — a ladder left leaning against the house, a shirt snagged on a sculpted hedge — hint at a sinister plot. Or are they just noise, the world's detritus faithfully set down without thought or understanding?

From its towering hairpieces to its curlicued dialogue (which, per Greenaway, "often, but never completely, threaten[s] to defy comprehension"), the movie's style is comically ornate, but at least some of its preoccupations stem from Greenaway's days making documentaries for the British government. The malicious tang of Restoration intrigue suits Greenway's gelid temperament to a tee; the movie is a sculpture in ice, impressive but inapproachable.

A Zed & Two Noughts summarizes less easily. It begins with the death of two women, killed in a car accident involving an errant swan. Their bereaved husbands, Oswald and Oliver Deuce (Brian and Eric Deacon), are twin zoologists, whose collective grief finds an outlet in an obsession with animal decay — vividly illustrated via time-lapse photography of several rotting animal corpses.

More a ballet of motifs than a sustained narrative, Zed riffs on birth and death, the beginnings of life, the Venus de Milo, the paintings of Vermeer (and forgeries thereof), the Greek alphabet and just about anything else Greenaway chooses to throw into the pot. The proliferation of themes is such that you may find yourself seeing their manifestations everywhere, like the draughtsman poring over his drawings. It doesn't take long to figure out that the movie's title refers to the word "zoo," which Greenaway literally spells out in 10-foot-high neon letters that provide the backdrop to several scenes. But what about when he films the letters from behind? Could that suggest the primordial "ooz" from which life arises? Your guess is as good as anyone's.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)