Drowning by Numbers (1988)

"A third film I’m going to list is Peter Greenaway’s film Drowning by Numbers. And Drowning by Numbers, a few years ago my wife and I at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, [Massachusetts,] got to show each other films that we loved, and the one that was the hardest for the Brattle to get hold of was a cinema print of Drowning by Numbers. I really wanted to see it on a big screen again; I’d seen it on a big screen when it first came out, and in the intervening years, seen it on video, but loved it. It’s a film about games, it’s a film about numbers, it’s a film about murder, men being murdered by women, who may all be the same woman, but are, at least the way that I read it, aspects of the triple Goddess — the maiden, the mother, and the crone — but all of them are having the same relationship with men. All of them are profoundly killing off these rather abusive and appalling men in their life, and it’s a strangely beautiful and absolutely surreal film that plays by its own rules. And one of its rules is it makes you in the audience count. You start noticing numbers showing up on screen and realize they are counting to 100. So when you are at number 50 on the screen and a character is explaining to you the rules of the game, you realize that you have another 50 to go and you’re exactly halfway through. Beautiful performances and beautifully filmed, and just one of those places where, as far I am concerned I wish there was so much more cinema like that, but there doesn’t seem to be."