Chappers
Monday 4th August 2008 2:45am [Edited]
Surrey
35,726 posts
It is really a very stunning visual piece of work.
A Zed and Two Noughts [DVD]
[Z1097]
A film by Peter Greenaway
“The boldest and arguably the best of Peter Greenaway's fiction features…. Definitely a one-of-a-kind movie.”
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
“Two legs look so good together, don’t you think?” A masterpiece of modern cinema, A Zed and Two Noughts is Peter Greenaway’s beautifully disturbing and darkly humorous take on erotic obsession and death. Opening with an automobile-swan accident in front of the Rotterdam Zoo, two women die and a third, Alba (Andréa Ferréol), loses her leg. The two widowers, twin zoologists Oliver and Oswald (Eric and Brian Deacon, in roles originally offered to the Quay Brothers), fixate on their wives’ bodies, and slowly become obsessed with evolution and decomposition—even going as far as meticulously crafting exquisitely morbid time-lapsed films of decaying corpses and creatures. Meanwhile, a mad surgeon plots to use Alba as a subject in his experiments with animal symmetry and Vermeer homage.
With this follow-up to his acclaimed The Draughstman’s Contract, Greenaway intensifies his already striking visual style by collaborating with legendary French cinematographer Sacha Vierny to create a masterpiece of motivated light. Full of surprises and magnificent conundrums, A Zed and Two Noughts is a perversely comic and teasing treat for the mind and senses.
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