There is nothing quite like Greenaway’s perverse ‘zoological’ treatise on human and animal mortality, decomposition and disability, as a car accident leaves a despairing woman without a leg and two grieving twin brothers without their wives.
Review #2,961
Dir. Peter Greenaway
1985 | UK | Drama, Comedy | 115min | 1.66:1 | English & French
Not rated – likely to be R21 for nudity and mature themes
Cast: Frances Barber, Joss Ackland, Brian Deacon, Geoffrey Palmer, Eric Deacon
Plot: A car collides with a swan outside a zoo. Two women passengers die but the driver Alba survives with a leg amputation. Obsessed with the accident, the zoologist husbands of the dead women—twins Oliver and Oswald—become fascinated by the processes of decay and embark on a strange affair with Alba.
Awards: Official Selection (Toronto)
Source: HanWay Films
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Slightly Mature – Zoology; Decomposition; Disability; Obsession; Mortality
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: General Arthouse
Viewed: MUBI
Spoilers: No
A Zed & Two Noughts could just as easily refer to the three main characters in Peter Greenaway’s sophomore effort (a follow-up to 1982’s The Draughtsman’s Contract) as it is to the word ‘ZOO’.
His film is difficult to describe and not for everyone, but if your intention is to explore the more bizarro side of British cinema, far away from Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, then you have come to the right enclosure.
As a car accident in the film’s jolting prologue sets up the death of two women, whose husbands are twin brothers (played by Brian & Eric Deacon), Greenaway tells their story of grief as they attempt to cope with loss by associating themselves with the driver, Alba (Andrea Ferreol), who unwittingly caused the tragedy.
With an amputated leg as a result, the despairing Alba draws the duo closer with increasing sexual intimacy. That’s not even the bizarro part because Greenaway has something peculiar and perverse up his cheeky sleeves—his film is a treatise on mortality by way of a zoological experiment.
“I can’t stand the idea of her rotting away.”
Shots of educational documentaries about animals (David Attenborough’s 1979 series ‘Life on Earth’ to be specific) are inserted together with narration about some eye-opening fact of life as Greenaway counterpointingly draws morbid fascination from topics such as decomposition (cue time-lapse videos of dead animals rotting away, maggots and all), disability (characters debate philosophically on what it means to lose two legs instead of one) and social etiquettes (upending them that is).
It is a film that is at once intellectually stimulating and politically incorrect, but such is Greenaway’s ‘who cares?’ attitude and his utter casualness in depicting nudity on screen that it is to some extent an offensively fun film to watch.
A Zed & Two Noughts may not always be compelling and some of its arguments about human and animal behaviours, growth and decay do beat around the bush, but there is nothing quite like it in terms of form, theme and structure, elegantly shot by the legendary DP Sacha Vierny, who would help Greenaway shoot several more pictures till the former’s death in 2001.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan 
[…] his unorthodox methods already visibly present in his early features such as The Falls (1980) and A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), Greenaway (together with DP Sacha Vierny), pushed cinematography and visual style to a […]
LikeLike