The Draughtsman's Contract
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| The Draughtsman's Contract | |
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 Cover of the 1999 Fox Lorber DVD release of The Draughtsman's Contract |
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| Directed by | Peter Greenaway |
| Produced by | David Payne |
| Written by | Peter Greenaway |
| Starring | Anthony Higgins Janet Suzman Anne-Louise Lambert Hugh Fraser |
| Music by | Michael Nyman |
| Cinematography | Curtis Clark |
| Editing by | John Wilson |
| Release date(s) | 1982 |
| Running time | 103 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
The Draughtsman's Contract is a 1982 British film written and directed by Peter Greenaway. The film is a period piece set in 1694. It was originally produced for Channel 4. The score was by Michael Nyman and borrows extensively from Henry Purcell. Greenaway wrote the script. The film uses extensive and elaborate costume designs, but has most of the action shot on location in the formal gardens and maze of Groombridge Place Garden, making good use of a limited budget.
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[edit] Plot
Mr Neville (Anthony Higgins), a young and arrogant artist, is contracted to produce a series of 12 landscape drawings of an estate by Mrs Virginia Herbert (Janet Suzman) for her absent and estranged husband. Part of the contract is that Mrs Herbert agrees "to meet Mr Neville in private and to comply with his requests concerning his pleasure with me." Several sexual encounters between them follow. Later he makes a similar contract with Mrs Herbert's married, yet childless, daughter. In the second contract, however, he agrees to comply with her pleasure. A number of curious objects appear in Neville's drawings, which point ultimately to the murder of Mr Herbert, whose body is discovered in the moat of the house. The drawings appear to implicate Neville.
[edit] Themes
Themes in the movie include power and deceit. A curious deceit perpetrated on the audience is a set of allusions about where the house is; some allude to the Southampton area, but the house is in fact further east, in Kent. This is because the woman who owned the house in the 1980s did not want the public searching out her house and traipsing around it. These explanations are also used by characters in the movie.
[edit] Background
The original cut of the film was about three hours long. The opening scene was about 30 minutes long, and showed each character talking, at least once, with every other character. Possibly to make the film easier to watch, Greenaway edited it to 103 minutes. The opening scene is now about 10 minutes long and no longer shows all the interactions among all of the characters.
The final version provides fewer explanations to the plot's numerous oddities and mysteries. The main murder mystery is never solved, though little doubt remains as to who did it. The reasons why there is a living statue in the garden or why Mr Neville attaches so many conditions to his contract were also more developed in the first version. It could be said that, rather than make the film more confusing, it adds to the sense of mystery and wonder it provides.
[edit] Restoration
The film was originally shot on 16 mm film, then blown up to 35 mm for cinema releases. In 2003 the BFI restored the film digitally and this restoration was released on DVD.
[edit] Sources
L'avant-scène cinéma, n° 333, octobre 1984, "Peter Greenaway: Meurtre dans un jardin anglais"
[edit] External links
- The Draughtsman's Contract at petergreenaway.org.uk
- The Draughtsman's Contract at the Internet Movie Database
- BFI's site with notes, the script and a lot of other stuff
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