A-to-Zed perversions

There’s nothing quite like being kicked out of the comfortable, predictable reality we inhabit by a film that takes us to a very different world, especially if that world is bizarre and sexually perverse.

Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts (1986) is everything—and anything—you’d want it to be. Like a talented prostitute, it titillates and entertains in all the right ways. And it will be up on the big screen for all to enjoy this weekend at Portland State’s 5th Avenue Cinema.

When twin animal behaviorist brothers employed at the zoo lose their wives in a freak car accident caused by roaming swans, their reaction causes them to spiral into an obsession with death, decay and sex. They begin sleeping with the zoo prostitute, Venus de Milo, as well as a woman named Alba, who drove the car in their wives’ fatal crash.

Alba, after losing a leg in the crash, becomes the obsession of her deranged surgeon. He wants to remove her remaining leg and make her part of his twisted scheme to recreate paintings by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. By the end, he will have accomplished both.

“How much of your body can you lose and still recognize yourself?” Alba asks.

Throughout the film, the brothers, Oswald and Oliver, watch the BBC series The Origins of Life as they become preoccupied with decomposition experiments, creating time-lapse films of increasingly complex living things. They start with an apple and work up to the final stage of the food chain: the human animal.  

“It’s cathartic watching life begin, because I know how it ends,” Oliver says.

As Alba tires of her life, the brothers convince her to give her body to them to complete their films. They ultimately decide that they then will finish their experiments by sacrificing their own lives, thus completing their macabre opus.

A Zed & Two Noughts is absurdly and darkly funny in how it touches on important themes in modern life. Director Peter Greenaway explores human versus animal nature in the juxtaposition of sex and science, digging into the clinically detached nature of modern human beings.

The stories of bestiality told by Venus de Milo stand in stark contrast to the methodical personalities of the twins who represent the truly objective mind. They are scientists, and their scientific worldview leaves little outlet for their grief. They embrace science as a coping mechanism.

Greenaway weaves a complex web of symbolism, comedy and commentary. “He’s a cultural omnivore, who eats with his mouth open,” Pauline Kael wrote of him in a 1991 New Yorker review. Nothing is off-limits. He bucks typical cinematic conventions by exploiting them.

Greenaway can also be a bit heavy-handed, beating the audience with the theme of decay and death, well, to death. This goes for the soundtrack as well. The music alternates between silly and haunting, but there are certain melodies that are repetitive to a fault, taking our attention away from some of the fantastic visuals and puzzle-piece dialogue.

The cinematography is strong and stylistic. This is the first Greenaway film that Sacha Vienry shot, and he would continue to work on all of Greenaway’s films until his death in 2001. This artistic partnership was a match made in heaven. Vinery’s pop and theatrical elements complement Greenaway’s comic style to a ‘T.’

If you have a twisted sense of humor, you will be highly entertained by A Zed & Two Noughts, and for anyone wanting to dip into films that are avant-garde yet accessible, this film is a good place to start. It’s fun to watch, if only for the outlandish sets. But I do not recommend it for those with a weak constitution, as the films of decomposing animals are a bit on the maggoty, rotting, icky side.

And make sure you brush up on the song “Teddy Bear Picnic,” as there are moments with definite sing-along potential, which I think Peter Greenaway would appreciate in his own tenderly warped way.