Peter Greenaway is an acquired taste or, perhaps, one never acquired for some viewers. His work is difficult, obscure, intellectual, theme-driven, and slim on plot. Most Greenaway films require several viewings to comprehend.

Historical Background: British screenwriter and director Peter Greenaway was born in Wales in 1942. He studied painting at Walthamstow Art College and had his first exhibit in 1964. In 1965, he began working in cinema as a film editor at the Central Office of Information, making documentaries. On the side, he make experimental "mockumentaries," of short and medium length, some earning awards at major film festivals. The British Film Institute sponsored Greenaway's first two feature films, The Falls (1980) and The Draughtsman's Contract (1983). The latter was his breakout film, establishing his international reputation. Some of the best of Greenaway's subsequent films include The Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1987), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), Prospero's Books (1991), and The Pillow Book (1997).

Greenaway's oeuvre is all of a kind, featuring his personal set of stylistic components and issues. The narratives are typically sparse and enigmatic. Greenaway once famously stated, "Cinema is too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to story tellers." His visual design is distinctive, appealing, and highly formalistic, reflecting his background as an artist. Greenaway's films are highly challenging for viewers, but it helps quite a bit to know Greenaway's philosophical concerns in advance. Greenaway's overarching concern is the issue of artistic representation. Greenaway rejects the idea that either art or photography can recreate or realistically record that which is its subject matter or which exists in nature. For Greenaway, art reflects what's in the mind, not what's in the eye or, even less, the external reality. All art for Greenaway is subjective. Greenaway extends the same principle to systems of thought, rejecting cataloguing schemes by which we organize our understanding of nature. He views such efforts at organization as distortions that unnaturally squeeze the reality of nature into our subjective fantasies. Greenaway has special interest in landscape drawings, which he characterizes as "nature rearranged to make a stage." The relationship between landscape drawings and the landscapes themselves is at the heart of the present film.

The Story: Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) no longer enjoys the interest of her husband, Mr. Herbert (Dave Hill), who prefers his property, his garden, and, even, his horse, to his wife. When Mr. Herbert schedules a fortnight's trip, Mrs. Herbert decides to hire a draughtsman, Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins), to make twelve sketches of the Herbert's estate, Compton Anstey, which she will ostensibly present as a gift to her husband upon his return. The draughtsman is a handsome but arrogant lower class artist and something of a control freak. He's reluctant to accept the job since he's used to being paid quite handsomely for his work and doubts that Mrs. Herbert can afford his price. After much haggling, a remarkable contract is drawn up by the lawyer, Mr. Noyes (Neil Cunningham):

Mr. Neville: The conditions of the agreement, Mr. Noyes, are: my services as draughtsman for twelve days for the manufacture of twelve drawings of the estate and gardens, parks and outlying buildings of Mr. Herbert's property. The sites for the twelve drawings to be chosen at my discretion, although advised by Mrs. Herbert.

Mrs. Herbert: For which, Thomas, I am willing to pay £8 per drawing; to provide full board for Mr. Neville and his servant, and . . . and to agree to meet Mr. Neville in private and to comply to his requests concerning his pleasure."

We also learn, as the story continues, what the contract further specifies in relation to each specific drawing. For example, for drawing #4, "from 2 o'clock to 4 o'clock in the afternoon, the front of the house that faces west will be kept cleared. No horses, carriages or other vehicles will be allowed to be placed there and the gravel on the drive must be left undisturbed. No coals will be burned that would issue smoke from the front of the house."

Working within these rigid constraints, the draughtsman proceeds to sketch, as faithfully as possible, every detail of the respective landscapes, as seen through his rectangular draughtsman's device which parcels the image into a grid. Then, in the late afternoon each day, he meets with Mrs. Herbert and unceremoniously orders her to assume some convenient position, raises her skirt, spreads her knees, and casually makes use of her for his pleasure, in accordance with the terms of their contract.

So meticulous are the draughtsman's renderings that they capture some peculiar little details that together suggest something is awry. One sketch shows a pair of riding boots on the lawn belonging to Mr. Herbert, which is odd because Mr. Herbert is supposed to be away on a trip. Another drawing shows Mr. Herbert's coat in an odd location. Still another sketch reveals a ladder leaning against the house and leading up to a second-story window. Mrs. Talmann calls these details to the draughtsman's attention and suggests they might be interpreted as an indication of wrongdoing and perhaps even that the draughtsman might himself be an accomplice. Mrs. Talmann suggests a new contract. She will agree to remain silent about her interpretation provided that Mr. Neville meet with her in private and furnish her with the same service that he is currently rendering her mother. Since Mrs. Talmann is a fine looking woman, Mr. Neville can think of no reason to decline this rather strange demand.

Well, such strange arrangements must inevitably lead to great intrigues. Mr. Herbert's is found murdered. Mr. Talmann discovers his wife's infidelity and is none too pleased. For the rest, you'll have to see the film.

Themes: This film is about the difference between seeing and knowing. Mr. Neville, the draughtsman, is a meticulous craftsman who strives to draw precisely what he sees. "Madam," he says to Mrs. Herbert, "I try very hard never to distort or dissemble." He is an artist but lacks both imagination and creativity. Before he'll undertake a sketch, he demands that the landscape be in pristine appearance and that no member of the household or its staff pass through his line of vision during the hours when he is working. The members of the household may not even burn coal that would emit smoke through a chimney that lies within the specified area. The draughtsman views the landscape he is rendering through a special grid that symbolizes his narrow and restrictive view. The grid compartmentalizes the whole in much the same way that categorization schemes constrain and distort thought. Since this is precisely the kind of narrow artistry and approach to thought that Peter Greenaway abhors, it stands to reason that Mr. Neville has little likelihood of surviving the narrative.

As it happens, Mr. Neville's mental rigidity is instrumental in his own destruction. He methodically records with technical precision all of the peculiarly errant details that together give the impression of evidence of a "misadventure" and his own wrongdoing: a pair of boots belonging to the missing Mr. Herbert, an unexplained jacket, and a ladder reaching up to a second-story window. Neville sees and records but he does not question or comprehend. Neville is downright tyrannical in the rigidity of his requirements, most especially in relation to his insistence that Mrs. Herbert make her person available for the gratification of his pleasures. He enjoys the superiority of his contractual position immensely, never suspecting that his own exploitation of the ladies is only to be exceeded by their sinister exploitation of himself.

Mrs. Herbert and her daughter, Mrs. Talmann, are two pieces of the same cloth. Mrs. Talman scolds her father for rating his wife as the least important of his assets, after the house, the garden, and his horse. Mrs. Talman's objection to her father's prioritizing system shows that she and her mother are also cut from the same cloth as the film's creator, Peter Greenaway. These two women live in an era in which women had few rights and even less power, but they've learned to exert their wills in devious ways. The estate, Compton Anstey, had belonged to Mrs. Herbert's ancestors, not Mr. Herbert's. It cannot be inherited, however, by a female descendant and the line is temporarily blocked by the fact that the Herberts had only one child and she is married to an impotent man. It's up to these two determined women, Mrs. Herbert and Mrs. Talmann, to take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and preserve the matriarchal line. It is these women who are responsible for the family's fertility, as symbolized by the pomegranate that Mrs. Herbert ultimately sets precariously on Neville's chest. Mr. Herbert is murdered, Neville is brought in to properly service and impregnate Mrs. Talmann, and then Neville is framed for both the murder and the cuckoldry. Since Neville is lower class, he's expendable, from the point of view of the aristocrats. It is Neville's tunnel vision that makes him an easy victim.

It is no coincidence that the film is set in 1694, near the end of the English Restoration era, in which the grounds of English estates were dominated by rigid geometries, formal gardens, and austere architecture. Those kinds of constraints on artistic and philosophical creativity are precisely what Greenaway deplores. Neville's death, in the film, symbolizes the beginning of the transition from rigid formalism into the greater freedom of expression that would characterize the high Baroque.

The thematic territory that Greenaway is exploring in The Draughtsman's Contract is very similar to what occupied the attention of Michelangelo Antonioni in Blow-Up. Like Antonioni, Greenaway first makes his point about the subjectivity of artistic representations in relation to his artist protagonist. In Blow-up it was a photographer; here it's a draughtsman. Antonioni shows us both the photographs and the events in the park and illustrates how the one is not simply a duplicate of the other. The photographs are subject to analysis and interpretation. Greenaway shows us the landscapes and then shows us the draughtsman's drawings of the landscapes. Though Neville did his level best to reproduce the landscapes faithfully, the peculiar clues they contained opened up a whole new realm of interpretation and conclusions.

Neither Antonioni nor Greenaway was content to make their point solely in relation to the protagonist. Like their protagonists, these filmmakers are themselves artists and the films are also, therefore, subjective representations. Antonioni made sure that viewers were reminded of his presence as filmmaker by keeping the perspective of his camera separate from that of the protagonist. Greenaway used a different device to make his presence felt. The drawings shown in the film were actually drawn by Greenaway, though he drew them in a manner intended to reflect the personality of the character, Mr. Neville. The drawings not only serve to remind us of Greenaway's presence as filmmaker, but also illustrate the subjective nature of art because the drawings are Mr. Greenaway's subjective interpretation of how a man like Mr. Neville might have rendered such drawings rather than truly faithful renderings of the landscapes by Mr. Neville.

In 1981, shortly before he undertook this film, Greenaway spent the summer drawing landscapes of his own house on the Welsh Border. He made eight drawings and methodically planned the sketches to represent eight different times of the day. Mr. Greenaway may not share Mr. Neville's belief that art can be a faithful rendering of reality, but he does apparently share some of his character's obsessive nature. Greenaway is well known for his insistence on meticulous control of every facet of his visual images.

Production Values: In addition to directing this film, Peter Greenaway wrote the screenplay. It's a witty script. The characters speak in highly stylized complete sentences filled with puns, witticisms, innuendo, ambiguity, and saucy put-downs. The language is arcane and arch. Greenaway's approach to filmmaking was most influenced by Alain Resnais's classic intellectual puzzle, Last Year at Marienbad (1961).

Greenaway's films are always a visual treat. Viewers should take some time to look at the images strictly as images. Greenaway is first and foremost a visual artist. He keeps his camera and his characters mostly stationary as though he were creating frescos or highly stylized tableaux. The mise-en-scene is meticulously composed, with evident attention to such matters as framing, symbolism, and symmetry. Most of the story of the film takes place at the Herberts' estate, Compton Anstey, which was actually Groombridge Place near Tunbridge Wells. The grounds and the buildings are gorgeous. The costumes are exaggerated restoration vintage. There's a naked man who runs around the grounds posing as various Greek statues.

The musical score by Michael Nyman is magnificent. Nyman began with six chaconnes taken from the English composer Henry Purcell, who wrote during the Baroque period in which the film is set. Nyman then superimposed melodic fragments on top of these bass motifs to create six musical numbers to correspond to the first six of the draughtsman's sketches in the film. Then, as events in the second half of the film recall one or another of the earlier scenes, the chaconnes return with new variations on the melodic overlays. The music is played by the Michael Nyman Band, featuring saxophones, clarinets, trombones, violins, and keyboard instruments (harpsichord and piano). Chris Royle is the counter-tenor.

The performances are all highly stylized, to the point of being absurdly camp. Anthony Higgins is masterful as the draughtsman. He previously appeared in The Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Janet Suzman gives her character both a lustful and duplicitous quality. She is best known for appearances in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and A Dry White Season (1989). Anne-Louise Lambert is exquisite as Mrs. Talmann, especially when she delivers her contract proposal to Mr. Neville and in her standoff with her cuckolded husband. Lambert is also stellar in another great mystery film, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Hugh Fraser, who later worked in 101 Dalmatians (1996), provides nice supporting work as Mr. Talmann.

Bottom-Line: The Fox Lorber DVD offers scene access, production credits, filmographies, and a listing of awards. The film is presented in letterbox with an aspect ratio of 1.66:1, in monaural sound. It has a running time of 103 minutes. You can find a number of reviews of this film in which the writer acknowledges not really understanding what they just watched. Nevertheless, The Draughtsman's Contract is one of the most accessible of Greenaway's films and a good starting point for viewers wanting to test the Greenaway waters for the first time. Far be it from me to guarantee that you'll like it. Greenaway's work is difficult, but also distinctive and original, so I recommend that serious film lovers give him a try at some point, recognizing up front that you might or might not like what you discover.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age