The Draughtman's Contract
At a glance...
- Directed by Peter Greenaway
- Released in 1982
- Runtime 108 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: Peter Greenaway is a little freak.
I have now seen 2 Peter Greenaway movies and I think I can safely conclude he is a little freak. Another well-constructed visual artwork that I'm sure upon rewatch would readily reveal it's clues and secrets that the characters are only slowly discussing and understanding for themselves. There is a slow tension that builds in the first half that took a while to notice, and I think I lost some of the threads at the end to understand why the ending happened (I had to read about it in a Wikipedia article afterwards). A much more subtle movie than The Cook. Crazy that this was produced for British television!
The ending monologue by Janet Suzman is just superb in my opinion, at that moment I really believed Mr. Neville was going to die by the hands of the women he had been bedding and manipulating for the whole film. It turns out, much like in The Cook, that Peter Greenway is more interested in indirection and more constructed endings for his characters.