Film

A cinematic control freak on par with Stanley Kubrick (and twice as misanthropic), Peter Greenaway specializes in art films that give both words of that label equal weight. Trained as a painter, the director is obsessed with formal symmetry; combined with his love of intellectual gamesmanship, he gives the appearance of making work for aesthetes and chess masters. But as his early features prove, there’s a fascinating madness behind Greenaway’s methodical hermeticism and no shortage of true brilliance.

His breakthrough, 1982’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, gives every indication of being a risqué Restoration comedy. A landscape artist (Higgins) is hired to do 12 portraits of an aristocratic estate, with payment being the carnal attention of the owner’s wife (Suzman). Then odd inconsistencies start showing up in the drawings, and viewers expecting a bedroom farce suddenly find themselves wading through a 17th-century version of Blowup. Civility, it seems, is the most dangerous of facades.