A Zed & Two Noughts

Life: it ends "with a swan and a white car, Ford Mercury, registration number NID 26BW, driven by a woman with flaming red hair surrounded by white feathers called Alba Bewick." Greenaway is a bit too eccentric, a bit too obscure but definitely worth watching. Special flavor.

Classic Greenaway: dense symbolism, double meanings, fringe intellectual pursuits, outrageous coincidences, bizarre names, art history, the alphabet, taxonomy, anecdotal storytelling, self-reference, and painstaking compositions. The cinematography is gorgeous. The film is just loaded with marvelous little details, plenty of sly wit, and food for thought. Like a lot of Greenaway, it's a rather cold and clinical film, but under the icy facade are some good human insights.

Perfect. I'm pretty sure even before i got into this ultra-deadpan/artificial style i would have found this really entertaining. A lot more accessible and easy to watch than other Greenaway, with just as much of what i love about him.

Greenaway has created a slimy, gross, unpleasantly off-kilter world. His characters speak and act in peculiar, baser ways, living out unusual desires without hesitation. I don't want to live in this world, but it's absolutely fascinating to watch. The vibrant colors; the pervasive symbolism; the symmetrical compositions; the fluid, unflinching camera; the remarkable music: these things are all spices that enhance the disturbing and amazing flavor of this unique film.

This is probably my favorite Greenaway film.

Overladen with enough pretentious mise en scene to undermine any substance, which reduces this film to drag along its feet (which I imagine are sporting sparkling platform shoes with fish inside them). Metaphors and symbolism are nice to see in films, but this film is a metaphor in and of itself, which is ridiculous since it gives this film no double meaning; its caked in a supposedly symbolic style.

The combo of Greenaway/Vierny/Nyman could make a film about wet paint drying, and it would still be one of the most theatrical, challenging and, ultimately, rewarding cinematic experiences of my life.

A bizarre but beautifully filmed tale from Greenaway.

Don't try to "get" it, just take it in and enjoy.

Goes at something beyond a leisurely pace, but every frame really does look like a painting in its format, with the design of the art direction giving everything an unreal and sometimes disorienting effect. The score is excellent, and the way it interacts with key scenes and motifs is astounding. For a film about death and coping with loss it is deeply unsentimental and very uncomfortable, yet engrossing. And often very funny despite the pervading aura of complete nihilistic despair.

A film with the central metaphor of amputation and decomposition, which is about the relation of two brothers and a woman, which isn't apologetic for any of it for even a moment. Now that is Greenawayish. I just gave myself to the compositional beauty of it and the wonderful Nyman accompanying. Opening five minutes is hardcore cinema. Rest is...more like an extension.

this helps, if you ask yourself how cinema is different as a medium than, say, storytelling

Oddly disturbing.

The last half is designed to test your will.

First minutes are quite inspirational and then the ideas are over and exhausting art-theater babbling takes over, with the indespensible shock scenes. A genrepiece.

Technical brilliance obscuring that it's intellectually shallow. Greenaway's films are intentionally closed-off and cold in a way that rarely resonates with me.

Sorry Greenaway, I didn't get it. Will try again in a few years.

Greenaway's formal and thematic preoccupations were firmly established with Zoo, marking his first collaboration with Vierny who went on to shoot all the key films in his oeuvre. Zoo finds him biting off more than he can possibly chew, and the film suffers from dramatic inertia, a glut of ideas, Greenaway's lack of experience and a grandiose vision that's too big for its budget/canvas. It remains fascinating for its uniqueness and a handful of humorously provocative moments.

This is what I call art!

you are an idiot if you do not love the shit out of this

Although it is many, many years since I saw this, my clear recollection is that the pretension was not redeemed by any discernible interesting ideas.

Another art-installation guy! Much of this is gorgeous, and some sequences I didn't want to end, and the score is beyond top-tier, but the DNA of this calls for the most annoying kinds of characters, in life and in storytelling, to explain it.

This is a rich, lush and difficult puzzle of a film is rewarding. Has distrubing overtones of J.G Ballard for me. The Nyman soundtrack is one of my favourites.

Absolutely gorgeous mis-en-scenes accompanied by a great score by Nyman. Audiovisual I was glued to the screen. But the fragmented story structure made the movie very cold. And though it was never inentend to be a narrative movie, all the symbolism and philosophical musings aren't interesting enough to make up for this lack of narrative.

Tries more at making a few points here and there than work towards an overarching message. Some more interesting than others, some more cliché than others. Wasn't very convinced by most of the angles but it had a few interesting oddities here and there. Properly executed cinematography and acting. Absence of a real plot but that wasn't too bothersome.

"On a par with anything by David Lynch for sheer surrealistic verve."

Bizarre, unpleasant, but beautifully photographed (by Sacha Vierny) oddity.

"None of Greenaway's films take place in anything resembling naturalism or realism, and they don't feel modern. They're like archaic storybook adaptations of Jacobean plays illustrated by Vermeer." - Jeremiah Kipp

Very weird but so well put together with multi layers of meaning and things to unpack.

Dead ringer's dead ringer