wpkrip This is more than just a movie,it is also a series of games and puzzles that we can play along with.Along the way things- and occasionally people- are constantly catalogued and numbered in clever and subtle ways.These numbers serve as signposts, indicating how far along we are, and sometimes they also have underlying meanings and echo.For example, note the number the skipping girl in the opening scene stops at.Her explanation for stopping at that particular number neatly ties in with the very last scene.The cinematography is superb.Many of the scenes look like oil paintings - both still lives and landscapes- by the old masters which, sort of startlingly,contain movement and life.There are also lots of scenes shot with colour filters or very intensely focused lighting, which makes for surreal but vivid and striking effects.All the actors do an excellent job, but two- Bernard Hill and Joan Plowright especially stand out for their superb elocution and deadpan wit.Finally, Michael Nyman's musical scoring is a treat.Ultimately, Drowning by Numbers is a black comedy but somehow a very lighthearted and engaging one.

Jackson Booth-Millard I found this film listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I was keen to see it both for this reason, it had a good cast of British actors, and the critics gave it positive comments, directed by Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover). Basically the film centres on three generations of women, all called Cissie Colpitts, the mother (Joan Plowright), her daughter (Juliet Stevenson), and her niece (Joely Richardson), all of whom are married. Mother Cissie experiences dissatisfaction from her husband Jake (Bryan Pringle) and his philandering ways, she takes her silent revenge by drowning him in a bathtub. But senior Cissie is not the only one, her daughter Cissie II sends her husband Hardy (Trevor Cooper) to a watery grave drowning him in the ocean, and her granddaughter Cissie III ends the life of husband Bellamy (David Morrissey) drowning him in a swimming pool. With these deaths being successive order and all being the same cause of death, local coroner Henry Madgett (Barnard Hill) initially has questions for the three Cissies, they respond by making promises to sleep with him in exchange for his silence and recording the deaths as accidental. Local gossip starts to spread about the water-related deaths, Henry's teenage son Smut (Jason Edwards) comes to the aid three women, so it is them one side, and the doubting townspeople on the other. Throughout the film there are also invented games played, specifically including counting and numbers, going from 1 to 100 mostly, with the involvement of literature and astrology, these are seen played by the leading or supporting characters, or in the background. In the end, the three Cissies and Madgett make what it looks like a getaway from the town in a boat, they deliberately cause the boat to fill with water, the three women throw the objects representing their husbands into the water, while Madgett removes his clothing, but the women join forces to drown him, and swim away. Also starring John Rogan as Gregory, Paul Mooney as Teigan, Jane Gurnett as Nancy and Kenny Ireland as Jonah Bognor. Plowright, Stevenson and Richardson as the lethal scheming trio are delightful anti-heroes, Hill gets his time as well as the coaxed man deliberating and lying about their deaths, each husband probably deserves what is coming to them, and it is most funny to see the deadly action and cover-ups carried out, the number games and music by Michael Nyman add to it as well, a fantastic black comedy drama. Very good!

Joseph Sylvers Drowning By Numbers is one of a very small group of perfect films I've seen. Not just 5, 10, 100 point films, but flawless to the point where numerical systems fail to be valuable. Peter Greenaway's third film is about three women a mother, daughter, and niece all named Cissie Colpitts, who one by one drown their husbands in a bath, in the sea, and in a pool. After the first drowning, the local coroner is asked to help cover up the crime, and he agrees believing this will give him car blanche to have his way with the new widow. He is rebuked in the first of several such attempts. His name is Madgett and he orchestrates for the town a series of seemingly random, perhaps ancient (in fact completely made up) games, consisting of strange rules and regulations, like "Hangman's Cricket" where half the game is spent learning the rules. Madgett's son is named Smut(our narrator), and Smut is interested in a young girl dressed in a fancy gown who always claims to be on her way to a party, and who jumps rope counting from 1 to 100 in the films opening sequence. Numbers appear in every scene whether spoken aloud or written on a small or large object in the background. One could make the film itself into a game called "spot the numbers", which count from the first scene to the last from 1 to 100. The film is full of small details some so obscure they are likely to please no one but Peter Greenaway or those willing to watch his behind the scenes blow-by blow "Fear Of Drowning", where for instance, we learn that many lines of dialog consist of the last words of England's kings, sometimes crazed non-sequitters muttered from their death beds. Why include such things, because it makes the game for fun, that's why. As always Greenaway composes every single sequence to achieve a sense of balance, and painterly poise. As usual most scenes, including idle landscape shots are recreations of paintings. Though the images are fantastic, the soundtrack by frequent collaborator Michael Nyman is stunning. I can't think of a director and composer whose works fuse together with such iconoclastic fluid grace since Sergio Leone and Ennio Mariconne. Nyyman's orchestral compositions are energetic, pulsating, lively, and captivating enough to be listened to and enjoyed apart from the film as its own music, and gives a sharp sense of irony and comic timing of its own to Greenaway's visual tableaux. Greenaway is not what you would call a "humanist" director, he rarely shoots close ups, instead remains in wide screen, and letting his characters take up positions as figures in an image, not actors on a stage, or in a film. This can be difficult to deal with if identification with characters is a pre-requisite for enjoyment, because the film aims for visual awe, wafts of aural pleasure, and snatches of witty literate dialog that only doesn't sound like dialog because of the casual delivery the lead actresses are able to give their macabre melodrama. Drowning By Numbers is a multi-layered film meant to be watched several times.It is a monument to be marveled at, but one where all of the elements of the film medium contribute the structure and design of the piece as whole, where form and content perfectly integrated into each other. The women who drown their husbands, at first do it out of anger, then out of disappointment, and finally out of "solidarity", or in other words for no real reason at all. The pattern of threes needs to be complete, three murders, three autopsies, and three funerals. We know the husbands will die, they are as inexorably fated to their turns in the plot as all people are fated for death, as films are fated to end after a certain number of scenes. We are made hyper-aware of these numbers because they are flashed in a countdown on screen. Does anyone remember the death clock, http://www.deathclock.com/, how it works is after a few personal details are typed in a clock appears counting down to the exact moment you will die. You can watch your life flicker away by measurements. We are all drowning in numbers. Yet it's not all doom and gloom, because the coroner while being an eternal bachelor as fated to be rejected by the widows he assists as their husbands were to watery graves, he is also the master of games. Like his first film the Draughtsman's' Contract the battle of the sexes consumes the characters, where in Draughtsman, an artist who believes he is having his way with a mother and daughter discovers all to late, he is in fact being used and disposed of, so does Madgett find himself helpless in the face of "female solidarity", leaving him to his only recourse of playing more games. Sure death is just around the corner at all times, but there are so many marvelous, silly, frivolous distractions to amuse ourselves with in the meantime; life and all of its contents. "No Country For Old Men" and Blow-Up have both made this same point about death's inevitability and life as a game of chance, but where both those films suffered a self-serious somberness Drowning By Numbers remembers to be a tragic-comedy and not just a tragedy. Life is absurd, of course of course, but the absurd can be very funny, and humor after all is happiness' cheeky cousin, sometimes inappropriate, but nearly always welcome. Smut: "The full flavor of the game Hangman's Cricket is best appreciated after the game has been played for several hours, by then every player has an understanding of the many rules and knows which character they want to play permanently, finally an outright loser is found and is obliged to present himself to the Hangman who is always merciless".

soulurge7 This is a very irrational and difficult movie to follow. When I first saw it on a large theater screen, the nudity and sex kept my attention. But most of all, the vibrant colors in the film were very prominent in the screen version. Sadly, that is not the case in the video tape version I watched recently. I could not find it on DVD.So I used the nudity and sex to keep my attention while I tried to detach from it at the same time and be objective. That helped me find the deeper story. And although this is a very irrational story, the characters display very normal behaviour in that they continue to repeat their same folly over and over. The men are all playing trivial games with each other and with the women in their lives. In order to get them to break out of their banality, the women try their best to get them to wake up.When they collaborate with the main male character, who is a coroner, the three main females try to use logic to justify their actions. But he just doesn't catch on. He uses the women and their circumstances to gain sexual favors from them. He, like the murdered men he buries, seems oblivious to what these females are trying to bring to him.In order to get a sense of what this story is about, it helped me to use some symbolism. In the title, "drowning" represents the belief that one is imprisoned or suppressed. All the males in the film drown. The other symbol I looked at was "swimming" which is the desire to be accepted or loved. All three female main characters are strong swimmers and all have the same name.In the end, you can moralize about the actions of the women, but that is not what this story is about. If you look objectively at the behaviour of the men, they are caught up in their lack of belief in themselves. So they waste time trivializing their lives. This lack of responsibility on the part of the men affects not only them but their families and the whole community.The women are so tired of not getting love and strength from the men in their lives that they are willing to risk their own futures by murdering those men. Not a very rational choice, but very poignant one. One almost has to laugh at the men who just don't seem to get it.