The Draughtsman's Contract (1982)

User Rating:

7.2/10   

Director:

Peter Greenaway

Writer:

Peter Greenaway (written by)

Release Date:

7 July 1983 (Australia)

Genre:

Drama | Mystery

Tagline:

A landscape of lust and cunning. [Video Australia]

Plot:

Mr. Neville, a cocksure young artist is contracted by Mrs. Herbert, the wife of a wealthy landowner...

Plot Keywords:

Artist | Contract | Drawing | Indignant | Dutch

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Anthony Higgins	...	Mr. Neville
Janet Suzman	...	Mrs. Herbert
Anne-Louise Lambert	...	Mrs. Talmann
Hugh Fraser	...	Mr. Talmann
Neil Cunningham	...	Mr. Noyes
Dave Hill	...	Mr. Herbert
David Gant	...	Mr. Seymour
David Meyer	...	The Poulencs
Tony Meyer	...	The Poulencs
Nicolas Amer	...	Mr. Parkes
Suzan Crowley	...	Mrs. Pierpont
Lynda La Plante	...	Mrs. Clement (as Lynda Marchal)
Michael Feast	...	The Statue
Alastair Cummings	...	Philip
Steve Ubels	...	Mr. Van Hoyten

Runtime:

103 min | Finland:109 min (1983)

Country:

UK

Language:

English | German | Dutch

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Iceland:16 | Italy:VM14 | Australia:M | Australia:MA (DVD rating) | Argentina:16 | Finland:K-16 | South Korea:18 | Sweden:11 | UK:15 | USA:R | Spain:13

Filming Locations:

Groombridge Place, Groombridge, Kent, England, UK

Company:

British Film Institute (BFI)

Trivia:

The movie was originally inspired by Peter Greenaway's attempts to draw a house he'd rented for a vacation and finding that the sun rising/falling changed the shadows and appearance too rapidly for a drawing to be completed in one sitting. He thus spent a specific period each day drawing the house from a specific angle (like the draughtsman in the movie).

Goofs:

Anachronisms: The cooing of a collared dove is not a sound that would have fallen on Jacobean ears, as the species was unknown in Britain until 1955.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Mr. Noyes: Mr. Chandos was a man who spent more time with his gardener than his wife. They discussed plum trees - ad nauseam. He gave his family and his tennants cause to dread September, for they were regaled with plums till their guts rumbled like thunder and their backsides ached from overuse. He built the chapel at Fouvant, where the pews are made of plumwood, so the tennants still have cause to remember Chandos through their backsides - on account of the splinters.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Peter Greenaway in Indianapolis (1997) (V)

Soundtrack:

Watery Death

Rich and rewarding

A very funny film with lots of great dialog. Some good examples of the dialog are listed in the quotable lines section of IMDb. Greenaway makes very intricate films. You can re-watch them and keep learning more each time. This one does not use the grotesque imagery which he used in films like THE COOK and ZOO. But it is still lushly composed visually, if more subtly. A word that comes to mind with Greenaway films is saturation - not of color, but of ideas. His background is in the arts and his films tend to be more like paintings layered with many ideas rather than the more literal representational photographic style used in most mainstream/classical/Hollywood film-making. Greenaway has a kindred spirit in Joel-Peter Witkin who also soaks each of his still frames in multiple outside references.