Draughtsman's Contract, The
Draughtsman's Contract, The
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Synopsis

A luscious visual banquet. It's as though Greenaway staged a Restoration comedy inside a Caravaggio painting. It''s the way of the world, the plot proposes, that the landowning gentry hire artists to commemorate their property and acquisitions. And in Greenaway''s effective irony, a patron''s most recent acquisition is the artist himself. "What we have here is a tantalizing puzzle, wrapped in eroticism and presented with the utmost elegance. I have never seen a film quite like it" (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times). With Anthony Higgins and Janet Suzman. Peter Greenaway---Great Britain---1982---108 mins.

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   | Lewis#4

This early Peter Greenaway film offers many of the traits associated with this fascinating, irritating director: the arch and artificial ambience, the painterly visuals (emphasized here by a largely static camera), the highly schematic plotting, the curdled eroticism. The story is a simple tale, wrapped in a mystery. In late seventeenth-century England, a draughtsman (Anthony Higgins) agrees to create twelve drawings of an immense estate during the absence of the estate's owner. His bizarre contract includes a cash payment, lodging, and sexual access to the man's wife (and later his daughter). Only gradually do we become aware of the mystery. Certain incongruities appear--an abandoned ladder against a wall, an item of clothing on a bush--all duly recorded by the draughtsman. Are these clues? Is the draughtsman chronicling a homicide? There's a bit of Antonioni's "Blow Up" in this, also an early manifestation of Greenaway's well-known conviction that certain paintings present a hidden story through subtly inserted visual clues. This is an amusing film. The dialog of the rural aristocrats is marked by venomous wit, and they deliver its complex syntax with stage-play precision. Their comically exaggerated wigs are a hoot. But there is also an ambiguity, unresolved at the end, that many will find vexing. The director, like his idle, berouged characters, loves his little games.

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