Long before The Mighty Boosh introduced the world to zookeepers Howard Moon and Vince Noir, king of British arthouse Peter Greenaway made A Zed & Two Noughts. It’s a zoo-based absurdist tragedy, gorgeously scored by Michael Nyman and featuring Andréa Ferréol and Frances Barber alongside (believe it or not) Jim ‘Big Break‘ Davidson.
It’s a film about which Greenaway has revealingly commented, “a parent often reserves his greatest affection for the most troubled and troubling offspring.” And which one of its stars, Joss Ackland, has apparently described as one of the worst films he’s ever seen, leave alone acted in.
When A Zed & Two Noughts was released in 1985, it marked Greenaway’s follow-up to the acclaimed The Draughtsman’s Contract, the film that had brought him to the public’s attention. Although that film was itself deeply idiosyncratic, it was a critical and (to an extent) commercial success which, for some, made what followed all the more flummoxing.
The film begins with a car crash, the work of a rogue swan. It kills the car’s two female passengers, leaving a pair of zoologist brothers as widowers. In an obscure attempt at explanation, the brothers Oswald and Oliver Deuce (Brian Deacon and Eric Deacon) immerse themselves in David Attenborough documentaries which chart the origins of life, whilst creating their own time-lapse footage of decaying animals.
The accident’s only survivor Alba Bewick (Ferréol) loses a leg and finds herself in the care of an untrustworthy surgeon Van Meegeren (Gerard Thoolen), who shares a name and an obsession with an infamous forger of Johannes Vermeer’s. As the film progresses the brothers grow intimate with Alba and increasingly dependent on (and similar to) the other.
A Zed & Two Noughts is wonderfully outlandish and often extremely funny, not least when one of the brothers is challenged by Alba’s daughter Beta to enquire as to the colour of a woman’s knickers. When he gamely does so the woman in question is surprisingly forthcoming, answering directly and upturning a table in her insistence that he sees them for himself.
Greenaway himself has described the film as being about three key themes: the notion of twin-ship; the natural world and; experimentations with light. It is in a significant way a tribute to the art of Vermeer, who Godard once dubbed the first cinematographer, based on his mastery of light.
It represents Greenaway’s first collaboration with legendary French cinematographer Sacha Vierny (Last Year in Marienbad, Belle de Jour) and together they ambitiously and impressively sought to make a ‘directory of light’. This involved lighting scenes in a plethora of different ways (26 in total), including the gamut of natural light, as well as by cathode tube, headlamps and fire, and even by the light of a rainbow.
If ever you hear anyone complain that British films lack flair then direct them immediately to the work of Peter Greenaway, one of the most eccentric and audacious filmmakers this country has ever seen. His work seems to have fallen from fashion in recent years but he really brings something special to our national cinema, treating the cinematic frame like a canvas and elevating the bizarre to something much more elegant. If A Zed & Two Noughts is folly then it’s a fucking fabulous folly for sure.
Cult Film Club – A Zed & Two Noughts (text) by Emma Simmonds is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
"…he really brings something special to our national cinema, treating the cinematic frame like a canvas and elevating the bizarre to something much more elegant. If A Zed & Two Noughts is folly then it’s a fucking fabulous folly for sure."
Beautifully put!
I think what upsets people (including Joss Ackland) about Greenaway is that he doesn't think like a film director. He thinks like a painter – and a very intellectual painter at that. Audiences expecting a linear plot, regular character development and simple emotional involvement often feel alienated at best or insulted at worst. But once you start playing the game along with Greenaway, and letting your imagination really connect with the extraordinary images (and dialogue), looking for cross-connections and metaphors, unraveling obtuse references and quotations, and generally submerging yourself in the unique atmosphere of his films, the rewards are wonderful! And as you said in your review, 'A Zed and Two Noughts' has more gags in it than it than many people realize!
Written by Tom Graham on February 7th, 2012 at 09:12