A zed and two noughts1/7/2024 ![]() The level of detail here is practically baroque, where even a tag on a dead dog's collar, reading "Dido" rather than "Fido", is, you suspect, intended - for the eagle-eyed and classically inclined - to recall the Queen of Carthage's suicide. What emerges is a darkly comic satire concerning the nature of humans and our relationship to the world around us that is so full of ideas that it threatens to come apart at the seams.Įven Greenaway himself admits in the commentary track that accompanies the film's latest release, that he should "acknowledge" the fact that it is "too complex" and that second works "can be rather laboured". Paradoxically, here, he is also preoccupied with the natural world and ecological order of things, so that the action is punctuated by stop-motion footage from the brothers' experiments with death, as they photograph dead animals rotting. He loves to strip any sort of naturalism away and thrust the inherent 'construction' of filmmaking into the face of his audience. But even if the major plot points can be summed up in a sentence or two, the artistic and philosophical questions Greenaway seeks to explore could fill the pages of many a film student's notebook.Įven the title, a description of the spelling of the word "zoo" - a term here that refers not just to the actual place where the brothers work, but in wider terms to the metaphorical "cages" we all inhabit in the world - is drenched in symbolism, from the Os representing the brothers Oswald and Oliver, to notions of eternity, eggs and, by extension, creation, called to mind by the circular letter.Īrtifice is, in many ways, everything to Greenaway. ![]() ![]() At the same time the car's driver also becomes the obsession of a third man, a Vermeer-wannabe surgeon, who sees her body - now one leg short - as an artistic homage in progress to the Dutch master. Two brothers lose their wives in the same car accident caused by an errant swan and become obsessed both with the notion of decay and death, and with the driver of the car. The basic story of Peter Greenaway's second fictional feature is very simple.
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