The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) – P. Greenaway

Director Peter Greenaway’s first big success takes place in 1694 in the time of William and Mary of Orange at a posh estate in Kent.  Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins) is commissioned to make 12 drawings of the estate in 12 days by the lady of the house (Janet Suzman) who wishes to use the drawings as gifts to secure a rapprochement with her husband, the lord of the manor, who has departed to Southampton for a fortnight.  In order to ensure that the light remains the same, Neville sits at the same time of the day for an hour or so in 12 different locations around the estate.  He claims to only paint “what he sees” and not “what he knows”, so he includes everything that happens to be found within the frame (despite warnings to the resident noblemen and women and their servants to vacate each successive location).  In way of payment for the drawings, the draughtsman’s contract requires £8 per drawing and a daily sexual tryst with the lady of the manor.  So, he is a rascal and he manages to endear himself to the women in the house (including the lady of the manor’s married daughter) but antagonise the men.  Aside from the draughtsman himself, all of the characters wear the most outlandish (and tall) wigs as well as pompous finery of the era.  Greenaway, a trained artist, supplied the drawings himself and also uses his painter’s eye to frame each (mostly static) shot of the film, save for a few slow travelling shots (that presage his later work in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, 1989, as I recall it).  There are some strange elements to the film (a living nude statue, for example), that may have been properly explained in the original 3 hour cut of the movie.  But more intriguingly, the film also poses a mystery of sorts for viewers to figure out – “extra” items that appear in the drawings suggest that the lord of the manor has been murdered (and soon his body does turn up).  I may not have been vigilant enough to figure this out or the British accents ultimately befuddled me, but there is a twist of sorts at the end that I won’t spoil here.  Suffice it to say that the film is a bemusing art object (with pulsating Michael Nyman score) rather than a gripping thriller and I suspect that Greenaway is not everyone’s cup of tea (but he is at his most mild here).