After 40 years, here is a re-release of a classic product of the British Film Institute and Channel 4, in the era when they high-mindedly sponsored non-commercial artistry. If anything, Peter Greenaway’s film looks more brilliant, more uncompromisingly cerebral and more exasperating than ever. Watching it again, I found myself thinking of Congreve, Dangerous Liaisons and The Wicker Man.
This was Greenaway’s breakthrough; it startled and entranced British audiences and European audiences even more so, with its rich, weird mix of luscious costumes and theatricality, emotionless line-readings, austerely inert staging, opaque plotting, mad elegance and mysterious eroticism. (It’s a distant cousin to the “chateau artporn” of the previous decade.) And all with Michael Nyman’s score chugging relentlessly away, like a violin bow sawing into your skull.
The Draughtsman’s Contract was also the film which for a period in the 1980s made Greenaway the most fashionable and admired British film-maker. Since then, the keynotes he established in this film have resurfaced again and again: the engagement with the fine arts, the love of candlelit tableaux – a dinner party scene here has the guests arranged along just the one side, as if in a study of the Last Supper – and an indifference to the usual styles of storytelling, although The Draughtsman’s Contract does have a rather noir-ish atmosphere, of a sort.
The year is 1694, with the new Protestant order firmly established in Britain. Anthony Higgins plays Mr Neville, a modish young artist with rumoured Jacobite sympathies which flavour the sexual intrigue with a distinctive sort of political paranoia. At a supper scene, in which the pompadoured and powdered guests converse entirely in cynical and knowing barbs, he is approached by wealthy Mrs Herbert (Janet Suzman) to draw a dozen studies of her manor house and surrounding estate. He agrees to undertake this project while her boorish husband is away on supposed business in Southampton, but with icy insolence insists on drawing up a contract then and there, stipulating a sexual favour for each drawing completed.
While in residence at Mrs Herbert’s estate, Neville’s smoothly arrogant and imperious demands irritate the other male members of the household. He makes the acquaintance with Mrs Herbert’s daughter Mrs Talmann (Anne-Louise Lambert), who is longing for an heir and sexually discontented with her impotent, bad-tempered German husband Mr Talmann (Hugh Fraser). There is also the prickly estate manager Mr Noyes (Neil Cunningham), once a suitor of Mrs Herbert.
Neville has a creative eccentricity: having cleared each view of stray humans as best he can, he insists on drawing everything in front of him, as assiduously as a camera – and there is a strange, stray article of male clothing in each picture. The absent husband’s clothing? Archly, Mrs Talmann informs him there is a rumour that Mr Herbert has been murdered, and Neville’s pictures could be construed as coded gloating over his cuckolding of Herbert and that he would be in the frame for murder. And so in return for suppressing the evidence, she blackmails him into a new contract requiring sexual services to her too. When Herbert’s corpse is recovered, these pictures become the centre of political and sexual neurosis, and the powers that be come to see Mr Neville as someone whose very existence is intolerable, although the macabre ending coolly refuses to be fully explained.
The sheer, bizarre vehemence and intensity of The Draughtsman’s Contract confronts the viewer now in the same way as it did then, and whatever its indulgence, this is a movie which (rather magnificently) refuses to dumb anything down, always demanding the highest pitch of attention. I prefer it to his later hit, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and Greenaway’s later work seems too often to be mere mannerism, with so much in the frame paralysed by painterly affectation. But The Draughtsman’s Contract has a singular brilliance.
• The Draughtsman’s Contract is released on 11 November in cinemas.
