Why j'aime Peter Greenaway... and why I loathe his films
The French have loved Peter Greenaway for 20 years, ever since his film The Draughtsman's Contract was released. The only British films we encountered at the time were social commentaries or nonsense comedies - Ken Loach or Monty Python. And here was something completely different: a UK director who put art before entertainment (we have always loved that) and was clearly immensely cultured (we adore that as well).
We French believe ourselves to be the most sophisticated people in the world, and in Greenaway we had found a brother, with whom we could discuss as equals the respective merits of British and French gardens or the grandeur of baroque music, or solve murder mysteries in the style of Agatha Christie or Gaston Leroux. The film was elegant, distinguished - in a word, aristocratic. We have never lost our taste for the aristocracy, even if we enjoy a little revolution from time to time.
Then came A Zed and Two Noughts, which some of us found too morbid, a little self-indulgent perhaps, but which also had its defenders. In 1987 The Belly of an Architect was guaranteed to appeal to us, dedicated as it was to Etienne-Louis Boullée, the great French architect of the 18th century whose Essay on Art made him one of the leading theoreticians of the Revolution. With this film, Greenaway won a place in competition at Cannes, an honour that any French film critic ranks alongside the state's highest decorations. But the jury, chaired by Yves Montand, ignored Greenaway's movie, preferring to give the prize for best artistic contribution to Stephen Frears's Prick Up Your Ears.
Cannes is a hard drug: once you have tried it, you can't walk away. Greenaway was back the year after with Drowning by Numbers. This time the jury, led by Ettore Scola, awarded him the prize he had been denied 12 months before.
In case you are not familiar with the film, Greenaway structures it around the numbers one to 100, slipping in the ever-greater figures in either a detail of the picture or the soundtrack. Some numbers are easy to pick out, others demand a little concentration, and a few are real sods to find. But we all got involved in the number-spotting, just as in 1961 we played another game in Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad. For me, that film is the perfect French precursor to Greenaway's work, with its taste for mathematical logic and intellectual speculation. It's worth pointing out that for a very long time Resnais and Greenaway used the same chief cameraman, Sacha Vierny.
But France is the land of Alfred Jarry as well as René Descartes. One of the best-kept secrets of the 20th century was the writer Raymond Roussel, whose key work was the book How I Wrote Some of My Books. We invented the Workshop of Potential Literature, whose practitioners submitted themselves to fearsome mathematical rules and stylistic constraints. For Georges Perec, author of A Void, this meant writing 200 pages without once using the letter "e"; other authors produced works that could be read from right to left as well as left to right. How could we not love Greenaway?
If Greenaway has never since been in competition at Cannes, he remains one of the festival's regulars. In 1991 we got a chance to see Prospero's Books; the film was less well received than its predecessors, no doubt because of its baroque excess. It's hard to imagine a French theatre director, say, taking such liberties with The Tempest.
In 1993 The Baby of Mcon was given a special screening. The film was linked to an episode from 17th-century French history, but that didn't ensure it an easy ride. Many in the Cannes audience claimed that the director was simply repeating the tricks that had served him so well in the past. There was the same reaction in 1996 to The Pillow Book, screened in the Un Certain Regard section.
But this year Greenaway is back in competition. The Tulse Luper Suitcases will be screened on Saturday. The day after, the jury will deliver its verdict.
· Jean Roy is film critic for the French newspaper L'Humanité.
I had a dream. I was playing Grandmother's Footsteps, and all of us playing were film critics, and sort of British (that's all I can claim). And Grannie was Peter Greenaway - with spectacles, horned ears and a forked tail - and whenever his darting eyes turned on us, we were all right if we were writing something horrible and terrible about Peter Greenaway. But if any one of us turned kindly, if anyone said, "In truth, Greenaway is not so gross," those poor souls were turned to stone and then the fragments of their own dried shit.
In other words, it's very odd, this thinking about Greenaway - especially in circumstances like these, where, as his new picture opens in Cannes to enormous French praise, I am supposed to weigh in with the opposing British view. I feel I need a good old-fashioned roast-beef sandwich and a pint of London Pride before stepping forward.
And there's the rub: like so many of us, I have a decent, yeomanly, unobtrusive loathing of the films of Peter Greenaway. I don't know why, but just thinking of him makes me want to huddle that bit closer with Falstaff, John Constable, Denis Compton and Diana Dors. Yet I have to recall that there is a devil in Greenaway - a wit, an un-Englishness that might take my four pals and make a wondrous movie about them. And, honestly, which other models of the humane and the humanist in British film could do the same? The last film-maker I can remember who was called horrid and loathsome and so on in print was Michael Powell. There's the warning.
No, I don't much like Greenaway, thank you very much - though I did enjoy The Draughtsman's Contract. It may just be that Greenaway is too smart, too wicked, too artistic for the British. I mean, he is nakedly pretentious - and the dread of being pretentious is a British disease that can lead to such things as the amiable but monstrous self-effacement of, say, Stephen Frears, who might be better off if he ever said: "Me!"
I know the vital texts in this matter, and I agree with them - indeed, I am a hearty "Hear! Hear!" rumbling up from the back benches on the musical farts of a good Simpson's lunch. I remember how Ken Russell asked: "What is it about Greenaway's films that make the flesh crawl? I think it's his apparent loathing of the human race." And then there was the fine and noble John Boorman, who once lamented the director's seeming lack of doubt, as well as "the sadism, the sex-hating, the food-hating, life-hating, child-hating, woman-hating, excrement-loving" in his work.
To be very fair, Boorman saw things to admire in Greenaway: "prodigious skills". He thought that the director had high abilities in the musical, the visual and the architectural. But he was not cinematic. I feel very much the same way, and it's important to note that being spectacular and obsessed with movement is not necessarily "movie-like". Yet I'm bound to admit that when it comes to doing dirt on life, or being obsessed with odious people, the movies as a whole have rather come to Greenaway's aid.
For isn't it the case nowadays that most pictures are made by people who hate or fear other people, and who have no faith in the better things of life? Yes, I exaggerate a tad, but still, the mindless nihilism of so much film-making only points up how original, how piquant, how vicious, how masterly the cruelty in Greenaway can be. For who could ever call this gloating thinker "mindless"?
In America, where I am writing, it would be enough to damn Greenaway to say that a Frenchman admires him. I will not stoop to that. As a matter of fact, at no moment since I have come to the US has French thinking been so valuable - and necessary.
So, yes, I hate Peter Greenaway's films. They make me feel the need to take a long hot shower - but then, I usually feel that way. And meanwhile, let me whisper this: we need him; he is a thrilling, insolent corrective to so much "Englishness". I fear he may be necessary.
David Thomson