I have asked certain users on Spout to recommend a movie to me. I will be blogging about these films as I watch them. This film was recommended to me by QFLW.
The Draughtsman's Contract
I've appreciated QFLW's comments here and there around the groups. She seems to have a similar taste in film as me and an enthusiasm to always check out new stuff. She gave me several recommendations, several from some of my favorite directors. But I decided on The Draughtsman's Contract because I wanted to see another Peter Greenaway movie, but wasn't sure which one to select.
The other two of his movies I've seen were A Zed & Two Noughts and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover with the former being my favorite. After seeing three of his films I'm going to make an assumption that he has a pretty distinct style that would be found in all of his films. If you enjoyed one, you'll probably enjoy most of the others. His films usually seem very clean and structured, which contrasts with the underlying chaos and madness that begins to break through. His influences come from many different sources. Philosophies and other forms of art. The influence and subject of this film are largely painting, drawing, architecture. The script with it's Victorian era language is really a delight to listen to. Greenaway is so talented in so many areas including writing, drawing, filmmaking.
Another notable aspect of any Greenaway movie is the Michael Nyman score. It pairs with his style perfectly. Taking classical themes and mixing them with something more modern and structure and artificial feeling.
For a while I was getting a bit too much caught up in the plot of this film I think. It's a kind of mystery story, but I'm not sure that will be entirely satisfying if that is the only aspect of it you watch. Probably not a bad place to start if you haven't seen a Greenaway picture before.
Peter Greenaway:
Total feature length films seen: 3
previous average film score: 8.5
average film score: 8.6667
Rating: 9/10