Peter Greenaway’s country-house mystery is funny, exacting and quietly vicious. The carefully arranged images repay attention, though the mannered conversation can make its people seem remote even while they are entertaining us.
Peter Greenaway makes the country-house mystery work unusually hard. The grounds invite close inspection, the clothes announce status, and the conversation provides reasons to distrust almost everyone. The Draughtsman’s Contract is a funny, exacting film that we recommend, though anyone requiring every clue to be accounted for may find it frustrating. It is easy to mistake this degree of care for solemnity, until the spite in Peter Greenaway’s screenplay starts to register.
Anthony Higgins gives Mr. Neville enough assurance to make the film’s concern with looking and understanding feel personal. His manner is a pleasure to watch even when the character is making himself difficult company. Janet Suzman, as Virginia Herbert, and Anne-Louise Lambert, as Sarah Talmann, keep the exchanges from becoming a display of one man’s cleverness. Their restraint suits a screenplay in which a civil tone can make an insult worse, and it encourages us to listen for more than the immediate joke.
Curtis Clark’s cinematography gives the landscaped grounds the same scrutiny as the people occupying them. The long-held, formally arranged views allow us to inspect who stands where and how everyone fits into the surroundings. John Wilson’s editing preserves that looking time, so the compositions remain readable instead of becoming decorative glimpses between conversations. We begin searching them for something the speakers might have overlooked, which is an effective way to involve us in a mystery without having somebody announce another clue.
Sue Blane’s costumes make this society’s appetite for display immediately legible. Their elaboration is funny before anybody speaks, and it makes the cultivated settings feel inhabited by people who expect to be looked at. Michael Nyman’s music brings a welcome urgency to all this posing; it helps scenes feel active even when the camera is content to watch. The combination keeps our attention on the screen during stretches when the dialogue might otherwise start to feel like an examination.
We laughed at the exchanges of polished insults, then felt uncomfortable about how much amusement we were taking in the bullying. Peter Greenaway lets the conversation stay civil while the intentions become unmistakably nasty. The people remain amusing long enough for their cruelty to seem momentarily acceptable, and that catches us off guard. The elaborate clothes help: their wearers continue to look respectable while giving us reasons to think otherwise.
The difficulty is that this control sometimes makes the people seem arranged as carefully as the landscape. Peter Greenaway can be so pleased with a verbal complication that we lose interest in what anyone actually wants. John Wilson’s patient cutting, so useful when we are inspecting a composition, cannot always make another mannered exchange feel necessary. There are stretches when we want the conversation to become less elaborate, simply so that somebody might sound capable of being hurt.
We tend to approach a country-house mystery by listening for information that will help solve it. Here, much of the pleasure comes from hearing people use words against one another, and from noticing how the pictures complicate what we hear. That gives the film plenty to offer even when its manner has tried our patience. Choose it for an evening when a disputed clue will improve the conversation afterwards.
