Another typical Greenaway outing, in which plot and character take second place to those favorite thematic concerns of formal symmetry and physical decomposition.
Against a backdrop of the autumnal Suffolk seaside, three generations of women, each named Cissie Colpitts (60-year-old mother Joan Plowright, 34-year-old daughter Juliet Stevenson and 19-year-old granddaughter Joely Richardson), murder their unsatisfactory husbands by drowning--respectively, Jake
(Bryan Pringle), in a bathtub; Hardy (Trevor Cooper), while swimming in the sea; and Bellamy (David Morrissey), in a swimming pool. In return for promised sexual favors, which the women ultimately withhold, the local coroner Henry Madgett (Bernard Hill) agrees to certify the deaths as accidental,
although a small but steadily growing crowd of witnesses and relatives put pressure on him, as well as on Madgett's adolescent son Smut (Jason Edwards), who is obsessed with death and collects animal and insect corpses. True to Madgett's--and the film's--own obsession with games, to decide the
issue he sets up a tug-of-war across a river, with him and Smut joining the Cissies against their detractors.
As the "story" of DROWNING unfolds, the filmmaker literally counts sequentially from 1 to 100, the numerals appearing somewhere within the frame, whether painted on trees, walls or dead cows, or as laundry marks, cricket scores, etc. For good measure, Greenaway also adds the dying words of
historical figures like Gainsborough and Lord Nelson, and he works in the names of 100 stars--the celestial kind. Then there's a circumcision by scissors, a continual revulsion for food and flesh, and some fairly nauseating scenes of bodily decay and corruption.
DROWNING BY NUMBERS is an amoral tale told morally, with a strong feminist undertone--almost all the male characters die via the unbeatable Cissies' conspiracy--reflecting, as Greenaway himself has stated, that "the good do not get rewarded, the wicked are rarely punished, and the innocent are
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