The only film I have seen on successive evenings in the cinema and a late juvenile infatuation which has lasted for decades. Yes, this is The Draughtsman's Contract by Peter Greenaway.
What is the strange hold of a baroque infused murder mystery set (oh so precisely) in 1694 over what passes for my adult self?
To truly love this film I think you have to take absolute delight in your mind being engaged though your senses, to secure great pleasure from the brain being stroked and tickled by all manner of curlicued tricks and feints.
The overwhelming nature of the film is that it fires up your synapses with aural and visual cues as you allow your mind to be wired directly into a weird baroque fuse box, the switch is flipped, the currents play and the brain lights up.
The film offers a positive cornucopia of sensory inventiveness that takes the kinked pearl at the heart of the baroque and polishes it anew conjuring Purcell with pulsing minimalist rhythms that variously have a cocksure swagger or a staggering lilt, wigs that reach for the heavens, cosmetics that blanch already sallow faces, gardens that are drilled to a tee, exotic fruits that seem just too juicy, landscapes that Claude might have painted - but didn't.
The baroque was never quite like this. There is an arch artificiality in most of what we see; a calculated exaggeration that plays up the strange sensibilities of a world being explored and which can be ordered, can be bent to the will through design and extraordinary gilded magnificence but also has an older savagery lying just beneath the system of contracts and law.
It is the veritable film of de trop.
I do, however, say that the mind is engaged through the senses rather than the heart being engaged through the emotions.
In most respects this is an emotionless film; an austere comedy in which the participants respond to the kinds of mechanical forces which are becoming understood at the end of the 17th century, with the atomism of Leibniz and the like, but also driven by practical consequences of land ownership, finance and particularly inheritance (in respect of which the director suggests legislation passed in the year in which the film is set gave married women a greater claim over the property of their deceased husbands).
To survive one must know one's place. One is indeed constantly, and deliberately, placed. The careful hierarchy of an ordered society means that gentlemen do not chase sheep; they leave that to the shepherds. Only the arrogant parvenu might consider themselves able to change the order of things.
Property was the currency of success, just as it was in the 1980s when the film was made (a 'property owning democracy' anyone?). Conveying the scale and nature of property and land ownership was a significant aspect of status for a member of the gentry or the nobility.
We are not yet in the heyday of landscape gardening but the Dutch influence on garden design - coming from a country which had pretty much dug itself from the sea - is becoming more apparent. The landscape is becoming more artificial.
So property and land are designer goods and they need to be recorded. Hence the role of a draughtsman.
In that context, the new science of optics is very much to the fore not just in the painterly eye but in the manner of cartography and draughtsmanship. The details must be recorded and must be in the right relations one to another.
Meaning is also everywhere. We are in an age of allegories. There are keys to what is presented and what is being seen. There is intended meaning in the motifs and patterns, allusions are a constant. One simply needs to know where, and most importantly, how to look.
Wider stratagems may also be glimpsed in the clues that are hidden in plain sight; even the linen that drapes the garden at various points, seemingly haphazard but in fact quite the opposite.
But then there is also what the eye does not properly see. Eyes trained in optical theory may miss a great deal of what is happening all around. Statues are not supposed to move. At least in theory. But perhaps they have more to tell if only the eyes and ears are suitably open.
The sophisticated can be terribly naive. It is indeed a thin line between genius and stupidity.
So, why is all of this so engaging?
In part it's the history. This is one of the most important periods in English history. But it is little known. Parliamentary sovereignty is now ascendant supported by the twin engines of finance and property. The film is a microcosm of the inner workings of the elite with its detailed engagement with the stuff of contracts, land and inheritance.
In part it is the way in which the contrivance and deliberate artifice are a perfect encapsulation of the baroque. There is so much surface that one may find it hard to see beneath. But what a surface: the house, the gardens, the costumes, even the pineapple.
Much of this comes together in the driving contrapuntal force of the music which races the participants towards their fate, a mysterious interplay of instruments from different time periods which apes the music of the time.
So the intellect and the senses of those who like their brains to be teased are treated to an array of glorious stimuli. It can make you feel clever but also make you feel that there is more to uncover. I hope one day to see the 4 hour version of the film which is said to exist. Maybe rather like the Married Women's Property Act of 1694.
Maybe it is also a film to watch if you fancy yourself in love, but quite possibly with the wrong woman. You know that you're not quite seeing straight but you are definitely feeling something. Unfortunately you have missed the equivalent of the moving statue and rushed ahead to impending rupture and a tumble over the ha-ha.
Which is all rather apt.
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