On a Rome-bound train, the architect makes love to his young wife. In Rome, he'll have 9 months to organise an exhibition about his idol, the 18th century French architect Boullée.

He feasts on green figs until a suave Italian tells a tale of how Augustus' wife fed him poisoned ones. From then on, he's plagued with belly cramps and vomiting.

He accuses his wife of trying to poison him, thus driving her away (into the arms of the suave Italian). He doesn't even notice her pregnancy.

The suffering architect becomes obsessed with the bellies of statues, replicating and enlarging endless images. He writes confessional postcards to the long-dead Boullée.

He's distracted. He's built practically nothing (just 6 1/2 buildings), and his idealistic ambition to mount a perfect exhibition is undermined by the lean sophisticated Italians handling the money.

His rival's sister literally wraps him in red tape, luring him into a compromising position. His pregnant wife leaves him, and his baby is no longer his.

He believes he doesn't have long to live. He's exiled from his dream exhibition, and postcards to the past go unanswered. His overambitious undelivered visions as an ARCHITECT matter to nobody, and he sees nowhere to go but down.

This tragic tale of flabby human downfall unfolds amid gorgeous glamour shots of immortal Roman monuments. It's beautiful to behold.

Are the creative and financial pressures faced by an outclassed American architect anything like those experienced by a parochial English filmmaker in Rome? Hmmm.

#PeterGreenaway #Film

A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) is beautifully filmed, with carefully framed shots that evoke Vermeer paintings. It's complex and fascinating, but probably not for everybody.

CW: death and decay of humans and animals, self harm, etc. Spoilers too!

The film explores the grief of two brothers who lost their wives when a swan flew into a car's windshield in front of a ZOO.

Wondering what happens to bodies after death, they create time lapse films of the decay of increasingly complex life forms (Apple to Zebra). While filming accelerated decay, they watch David Attenborough's "Life on Earth" documentary about the origins of life.

Scientific study of creation and death couldn't explain the loss of their wives via a Violent Unexplained Event. The brothers, born as conjoined twins, seek unorthodox surgery to make them whole again. They also have affairs with the same two women, eventually fathering twins with one.

Is there order beyond duality? A mad scientist obsessed with Vermeer tries to turn women into paintings. His wife, who wears a red feathery hat even when otherwise nude, keeps appearing perfectly framed, like a painting. His artifice (carefully lit arrangements, forced symmetry and cropping) has much in common with the filmmaker's framing.

In the zoo itself, animals are caged and methodically classified. The brothers release some of the animals, but they look just as unnatural in the urban street. Is there any real release from these artificial circumstances?

The brothers set up their final film at the l'Escargot estate, where they plan to devolve into primordial OOZ. Does their artistic and scientific project survive them? Or was it all for nought?

#PeterGreenaway #Film #AZedAndTwoNoughts