Three women with the same name, Sissy Colpitts, decide to drown their tired husbands. They know very well that they will get away with it. A medical examiner in love with all three of them will gladly write them accidental death certificates.
But, bound by a promise of silence, he finds himself in a “deep puddle” when witnesses to the murders begin to “surface”…
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One two three four five six seven, all good children go to heaven.
When morality, long thrown overboard, is no longer able to keep the keel of the leaky boat called life, the truly attractive games begin in the stern. What can be played in the company of promiscuous women and their voluptuous chosen ones, whose hands are untied and thoughts are ephemeral and impossibly shameless, Peter Greenaway knows. Only those who make no secret of their interest in all things carnal are invited to the gaming table – sex, putrefaction and other alluring, life-generating acts over matter have always caught the eye of the Brit and his heroes.
The European cinematic bohemia clearly felt involved in Greenaway’s games: in 1988, the fifth feature film of the filmmaker receives the Cannes prize for artistic contribution. However, the success of ‘Drowning by Numbers’ did little to change Greenaway’s views on cinema: the art that had allowed him to be “both writer and painter”, he considers no longer viable, doomed to fall under the onslaught of the next formation (interactive art). At the “sunset of the film era” Greenaway preferred the role of the director-consolidator and created in his films an extravagant jumble of various details, an interweaving of styles and the interpenetration of epochs. However, outside of the native English genre, the Welshman could not work – the murky system of ‘Drowning by Numbers’ is not difficult to strip down to a detective. Greenaway brilliantly veiled the banality – transforming the detective framework from its base to its throat, offering as early as the first half of the film a complete catalog of would-be corpses and a parade of killers.
“Drowning Countdown” is, above all, a film about sexual frustration. Every Sissy Colpitts (maybe a “sister culpit”) is like Eve, who, having tasted the forbidden fruit and tasted its poisoned sugar on her tongue, has been pining away for years, waiting for God’s punishment. The hatred of unquenchable, defective men slowly and surely leads to the end of one game (called marriage) and the beginning of an entirely new one – the woman begins to take revenge. Vengeance for infidelity, luxurious, white-washed, spread out in the center of the frame with a still life by Caravaggio, a painting by Rubens, languishing in filthy tubs of wine and apples. Avenging insensitivity, inaccessible, with touches as arrogant and cold as fruit ice, and avenging an unwillingness to progress, an inability to go to battle with her fear. And in each case, the man is the embodiment of all that is reasonable, destroyed by the woman, drowning in the storm of her instincts.
In ‘Drowning by Numbers’ there is not, never will be, crystal clarity, nor can order remain in the mind of one who has known sin. The fateful chain of numbers from one to a hundred, turning the dirty apples of the beginning of the film into scarlet roses of the end, will remain a mute reproach to man in his selfish desire to order everything around him. The system, as it were, will remain a weapon in the hands of the little boy who wants to count all the leaves on the tree-the marks it makes kill. And the simplest and most trivial, left unnoticed in the first act, is transformed into a really fun game in the last act. After all, what could be more fun than death?
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (92.8 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.66:1
Audio
English: FLAC 2.0
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
Subtitles
English SDH.
