A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS
A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS
In Peter Greenaway’s world, films rarely begin ordinarily. Outside the gates of a zoo, a swan crashes into the bonnet of a car, killing the wives of twin zoologists Oliver and Oswald. Only the driver, Alba Bewick, survives, and before long both grieving brothers fall in love with her.
By night they watch wildlife documentaries; by day they try to dissect death itself, developing an increasingly unhealthy fascination with decay.
Greenaway, however, is not interested in death merely for its grotesque potential. Life and death form a natural, inevitable cycle, and the brothers’ time-lapse studies of rotting fruit and animal carcasses can be as beautiful as the still lifes created by the Dutch masters.
A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS is a veritable catalogue of eccentricities. There is the surgeon van Meegeren, who spends his spare time nurturing an obsession with Vermeer; a sex worker named Venus de Milo, trying her hand at writing; and Alba, who loses a leg in the crash and whose pursuit of perfect symmetry develops into an obsessive desire to have the other one amputated as well.
Symmetry, reflections and mirrors govern not only the composition of the frame but the characters’ lives. Behind the camera is Sacha Vierny, Alain Resnais’s cinematographer, beginning a long collaboration with Greenaway. This collaboration would be characterised by treating light almost as a character in its own right: sculpting the frame, drawing out colour and transforming zoos, laboratories and hospital rooms into images that might belong on a museum wall.
The film cemented Greenaway’s reputation in the art-house world and remains one of cinema’s strangest explorations of grief.
Text: dr Adrianna Woroch
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