Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers is like an impossibly layered, half-remembered childhood memory that is rich, alive, and real. It expresses more than any combination of words can hope to. It is a film, like so much of the universe, expressible only through numbers.
Drowning by Numbers is the fourth feature film by the eclectic British director Peter Greenaway, whom he described as a “tale told to adults by children.” Known for his bold and often shockingly abject films, he attempts to oppose what he calls a “cinema of illustrated text”, where scripts dictate films rather than the image itself. His films fight this with strikingly beautiful, lavishly detailed images that elicit, emote, and appear like paintings dreamed up and recollected. More so than any other director, his films are a series of paintings.
Drowning is a bloodless death; it can easily be explained away, and can easily be covered up. That’s exactly what Cissie Colpitts, a grandmother (Joan Plowright), her daughter (Juliet Stevenson) and her niece (Joely Richardson) ask the local coroner, Madgett (Bernard Hill), to do. One by one, each of the three women drowns her dissatisfying husbands in the bath, the sea and a swimming pool, all the while relying on Madgett to falsify the death certificate.
Yet as the drownings continue, suspicions amongst the locals grow, and they form a group of conspirators set on exposing the truth. In Greenaway’s book on the film, Fear of Drowning, he describes the film as “…shaped like a long slow spiral, uncoiling to its end.” Connecting these series of ‘spirals’ are the many games of Madgett and his son Smut (Jason Edwards). From hangman’s cricket, to tug of war, to Madgett’s games of blackmail as he attempts to get sexual gratification for his favours, the games seek to ultimately explore men’s impotence.
“Have you never wondered how many leaves there are on a tree?” Madgett asks the three women as Smut paints each leaf. “Never,” they all reply. The male characters’ obsession with indexing, cataloguing, and counting everything, much to the women’s bemusement, indicates their inherent unnaturalness. For them, nature is something to number and count; something to classify, know, and thus conquer.
Each of the three husbands cannot swim; each has their tools – a garden fork, a typewriter and a radio dropped into the lake with their ashes. The games each plays, like their tools and their counting, are essentially systems of logic used to make sense of a world they cannot properly navigate. It’s even apparent in Madgett’s name, one that Greenaway claims “to suggest both maggot and magic.” Like a maggot that will ascend and transform into a fly, these men are trying to do something similar with their own form of magic: machines, rules, and games.
Drowning by Numbers (1988)
Meanwhile, the three women, all of whom share the same name and commit the same acts as if they were one, play into the historical tropes of magical women. From the three witches of Macbeth to the three Graces in Greek mythology, they have a kind of true magic that the men lack. Like so many of Greenaway’s female characters, such as Georgina Spica (Helen Mirren) in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the three Colpitts possess a kind of seamless air about them, a ruthless and earthy power that is beyond the men’s comprehension. They are presented as diametrically opposed: separate, childlike, and caught up in the frivolous, false reality of their game-playing.
Numbers are frequently understood as the “exacting language of the universe,” as Greenaway puts it, and men want to become fluent in it, revealing an innate outsidedness that only they and the children possess within the film. This parallel lies at the centre of Drowning by Numbers: men are forever children in a world in which they cannot swim.
This game-playing transcends the film’s fiction, littering many scenes with numbers from 1 to 100 for the audience to count. Often diegetically hidden in the background, the numbers involve the audience, making the film a kind of game in itself. It’s a surprisingly engaging inclusion, only further emphasised by Greenaway’s long-trusted cinematographer, Sacha Vierny. Here, Vierny’s use of lighting and colours, especially at dawn or dusk, evokes an impossibly powerful sense of childhood, of days misremembered into sanctity. It makes the film feel as if it borders on that hypnagogic state between waking and sleeping. It’s like finding a little drawer of your milk teeth, buttons, and feathers collected from an early birthday at the zoo. It’s a singular style, now so antithetical to the clean, sanitised cinematography of many modern films that it further emphasises the seemingly infinite richness of youth against the present’s apparent flatness.
This arcadian sense of childhood is furthered by another long-term collaborator of Greenaway, composer Michael Nyman, whose score is not only a serious standout but a crucial component of Greenaway’s fathomlessness. The score frequently uses horns and wind instruments to create a childlike exaltation, a sense of running freely in the fields, of being without tribulation or tragedy. It elevates the film’s pastoral nature while also adding a twisted eccentricity to its darker moments. However, when the score needs to, it becomes poignant, with heavy, encumbered strings, almost operatic. It adds to the film’s strange reality, a thing at once real and unreal.
For all the film’s metaphors and complexities, it is simply structured. There are three women, three murders and three funerals. It avoids drowning in its own intricacies, partly due to its stellar cast, each of whom appears utterly at one with their character. Bernard Hill is a particular standout, showing a subtle, believable balance of potency and impotence. The three women also deliver magnificent performances, with Joan Plowright in particular bringing such gravitas and vehemence that she carries much of the film’s scenes. Side characters, such as the husband, Hardy, played by This Country’s very own Trevor Cooper, are jaw-grindingly brilliant in their portrayal of a meek, feeble husband uninterested in sex, life, or anything in between.
Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers is like an impossibly layered, half-remembered childhood memory that is rich, alive, and real. It is a film that expresses more than any combination of words can. It is a film, like so much of the universe, that is only expressible through numbers.
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