Themes: Mothers and Daughters, Treacherous Spouses, Out For Revenge
Main Cast: Bernard Hill, Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, Joely Richardson, Jason Edwards
Release Year: 1988
Country: UK/NL
Run Time: 121 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Peter Greenaway wrote and directed this typically surreal and iconoclastic black comedy. Three generations of women who share the same name -- 63-year-old Cissie Colpitts (Joan Plowright), her daughter Cissie Colpitts II (Juliet Stevenson), and granddaughter Cissie Colpitts III (Joely Richardson) -- have all discovered the same way of dealing with their marital problems. The senior Cissie has drowned her husband Jake (Bryan Pringle) in the bathtub, her daughter sent her spouse Hardy (Trevor Cooper) to a watery grave in the ocean, and the youngest Cissie sent her husband Bellamy (David Morrissey) down in a swimming pool. Needless to say, local coroner Henry Madgett (Barnard Hill) has some questions about this sudden rash of drownings among the Colpitts husbands, and again all three women respond in the same way: they promise to sleep with Henry in exchange for recording the deaths as accidental (though none of the Cissies make good on this promise). When the local gossip mill begins working overtime about this sudden rash of water-related deaths, Henry's teenage son Smut (Jason Edwards) comes to the aid of the Cissies and organizes a tug-of-war, with he and the Colpitts women on one side and the doubting townspeople on the other (and, of course, a river in the middle). Along the way, Greenaway often stops to contemplate his obsessions with literature, astronomy, and numbers. Drowning by Numbers was released in Europe in 1988, but didn't find its way to American screens until 1991, following the success of Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
Iconoclast Peter Greenaway achieved his biggest crossover success at the time with this tidy, baroque rumination on marriage, deceit, and sisterhood. The result is something of a primer for anyone unfamiliar with Greenaway's work: there is the director's obsession with forms, patterns, and numbers; his fascination with women and sexuality; and his strong taste for all things gruesome, scatological, and macabre, which he insists lurk beneath the veneer of polite Western society. As the three identically named women at the center of the film unapologetically kill their male partners, the film acquires a deadpan, absurdist glee which had been in short supply in Greenaway's previous efforts, and which he would exploit in his next feature, the breakthrough The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Greenaway's penchant for subversive casting results in a welcome comic turn from the legendary Joan Plowright, whose Hollywood career achieved something of a resurgence in the years that followed. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide
Bryan Pringle - Jake; Trevor Cooper - Hardy; David Morrissey - Bellamy; John Rogan - Gregory; Paul Mooney - Teigan; Jane Gurnett - Nancy; Kenny Ireland - Jonah Bognor; Michael Percival - Moses Bognor; Joanna Dickens - Mrs. Hardy; Janine Duvitski - Martina Bellamy; Jose Berg - Skipping Girl's Mother; Vanni Corbellini - The Hare; Roderic Leigh - Policeman; Natalie Morse - Skipping Girl; Edward Tudor-Pole - Mr. 71 Van Dyke; Arthur Spreckley - Sid the Gravedigger; Ian Talbot - Police Detective; Sharon Howard-Field; Michael Fitzgerald - Mr. 70 Van Dyke
Credit
Heather Williams - Costume Designer, Dien van Straalen - Costume Designer, Peter Greenaway - Director, John Wilson - Editor, Michael Nyman - Composer (Music Score), Sara Meerman - Makeup, Jan Roelfs - Production Designer, Ben Van Os - Production Designer, Sacha Vierny - Cinematographer, Kees Kasander - Producer, Bill Stephens - Producer, Denis Wigman - Producer, Allard Bekker - Set Designer, Constance de Vos - Set Designer, Peter Greenaway - Screenwriter
The structure, with similar stories repeated three times, is reminiscent of a fairy tale. The link to folklore is further established by Madgett's sonSmut, who recites the rules of various unusual games played by the characters as if they were ancient traditions. Many of these games are invented for the film, including:
Number-counting, game rules and the plot's repetitions are devices that emphasize structure and symmetry in Drowning by Numbers. Through the course of the film the numbers one to one hundred appear in order, sometimes seen in the background, sometimes spoken by the characters.
The musical score is by Michael Nyman, and is, at Greenaway's specific request, entirely based on themes taken from the slow movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in E flat, K364, bars 58-61 of which are heard in their original form immediately after each drowning. Nyman was alerted to the potential of this piece by Greenaway in the late 1970s and had previously used it as material for part of the score for Greenaway's The Falls and for "The Masterwork" Award Winning Fish-Knife and Tristram Shandy.[2] "Trysting Fields" is the most complicated use of the material: every apoggiatura from the movement, and no other material from the piece, is used.[citation needed]
The album is the tenth by Nyman, and the seventh to feature the Michael Nyman Band.
Recorded and Mixed at Landsdowne Recording Studios
CD Pre-mastered by Ian Gillespie at Tape One Studios, London
Designed by Assorted Images & Icon
The back cover of the album booklet has a large number 58. Fred Ritzel has pointed out that the Skipping Girl (Natalie Morse) reaches number 58 in her counting game.[3] These are subtle ways of drawing attention to the key bar of the Mozart piece.
