Restoration England, 1694: a lady asks a painter to make twelve drawings of her residence to give to her husband who married her for interest, provided that every day, after work, he has fun with her in bed. But her husband is found drowned in a ditch. Characterized by a sophisticated and dry stylization, a story of figures in a landscape, a grotesque comedy of the absurd, it is a film about art and sex, both represented as work and subordinated to economic interests. It is also a critical essay on the right to property as the driving force of social life. In its own way, it is a perfect film for the precise and calculated congruence of the parts with the whole. Beautiful musical score by Michael Nyman. Awarded at the Venice Film Festival, it gave P. Greenaway international fame.
(il Morandini)
In a villa in the English countryside, in the mid-seventeenth century, a painter is commissioned by the owner, Lady Herbert, to make twelve drawings of the sumptuous residence. To convince the reluctant painter, she inserts a clause in the contract stating that she will give herself to him at the end of each drawing. The painter sets to work, but disturbing objects appear in the landscape: blood-soaked doublets, torn shirts, clues to a crime: that of the castellan, who will be found murdered in the garden. His drawings have become documents of the deadly intrigue, and the painter, who in the meantime has also obtained the favors of the Herberts' daughter, will in turn be killed.
(Farinotti)
The critique
“Where did the excellent debutant Greenaway get the subject of his «mysteries»? From a manuscript found at the end of the nineteenth century in an English manor? From the vengeful notebook of a Catholic ancestor? No, he got it in his head, perhaps by playing at being English as if he were a slightly Mannerist European man of letters. It is clear that the theme (the ambiguity of reality and the artist's subservience) is very modern, born in an imagination that has already known Losey, Kubrick and Antonioni, as well as having frequented the great painting of England and the continent. On one side there is the scene, the villa and the gardens, on the other there is the witness, the painter Neville, in the middle there is the instrument of mediation, painting, the shot, the illusion of breaking down reality into an exact and incontestable grid. The noble lady of the house, to give a gift to her husband who has left for a trip, asks the painter to paint the villa and the gardens, adding the libertine condition that he, to earn his full fee, every evening provide a gallant service. Isn't all this very English? But as the brush strokes and the meetings with the dominating lady pass, disturbing obstacles appear; not only does the daughter of the noblewoman, unhappily married, demand the same benefits granted to her mother (it is part of the family balance), but the gardens reveal a mystery in the painting, the suspicion that the husband has not left at all, but that he was killed and that his body lies hidden somewhere. It is true, the crime has taken place, art seems to have won a shining victory over the corruption of the powerful of three centuries ago, but you will see that it is only for a short time, the final word always belongs to the client, art even when it discovers the truth does not cease to be a handmaiden. Extremely accurate in its visual scans, pungent in its supporting characters, including a symbolic stone guest, Greenaway's film (simply titled in the original The Draughtsman's Contract) is a fine demonstration of intelligence combined with natural cunning)”
Stefano Reggiani (La Stampa, November 27, 1983)
“In the chaos of Venice there is always some film that is taken lightly by the exhausted critics. At the 1982 Festival one of the victims was The Draughtsman's Contract, which won one of the AGIS-BNL awards but was dismissed by many journalists, including us, with a certain intolerance, to which the Italian subtitles were probably not unrelated, insufficient to express the nuances of a very dense and literary speech. With a rested mind, and also thanks to the excellent dialogues of Masolino d'Amico, the film now titled The Mysteries of the Garden of Compton House gets the attention it deserves for a very original work, of great intellectual elegance. Neither easy to interpret nor enjoyable by everyone, but curiously traversed by occult signs, word games and ambiguous symmetries, all elements of an expressive structure that replicates the ambiguity of reality, with its enigmatic relationship between what the eye sees and the mind understands (we are in the vicinity of Blow-up).
Written and directed by the Englishman Peter Greenaway, a 41-year-old painter-filmmaker who comes from the avant-garde, the film is essentially a thriller. In late seventeenth-century England, the wealthy Herbert family lives in a sumptuous country villa. Since between the spouses there are or disagreements have arisen - it seems that Mr. Herbert sympathizes a little too much with the gardener - to restore peace the landlady wants to commission the painter Neville to make a series of drawings of the villa and the garden, to give to her husband when he returns from a short trip. At least that's what she says. Neville accepts only on the condition that Mrs. Herbert, after each drawing, grants him her favors. Once the contract is signed, the lady respects it, but the painter does not get the garden to be perfectly tidy, free of people and things, at the established times. Someone scatters it with objects that could be the clues of a scam in which the Herberts, and their guests, are involved. Neville tries to represent the truth by questioning his appearances, but in turn he inadvertently enters the game when, the terms of the contract are reversed, it is Herbert's daughter, the childless wife of an impotent German, who offers herself to the painter under the pretext of inducing him to not reveal his suspicions. Neville willingly agrees, and that is his end. Having discovered the body of Mr. Herbert (we don't know who killed him: perhaps the administrator, his wife's lover, or perhaps a playful servant), having obtained that the painter made the young woman fertile and the estate remained in the family, Neville is a witness to be eliminated. After having blinded him, they kill him and burn his drawings.
The greatest interest offered by the film, produced by the British Film Institute and the fourth channel of English TV, does not lie in its plot (the most up-to-date would say in the plot), but in the ways in which it develops: in the relationship between the narrative fabric, with its criticism of the customs of a cynical and vicious nobility, and the formal process symbolized by the use of that sort of pantograph that the protagonist painter uses to frame the object of the drawing, similar to the camera that frames the scene. The film's driving force lies in the dialectic between Neville's claim, who has at his disposal an instrument that would like to artificially force the flow of reality into geometric dimensions, and Greenaway's irony, which reminds us what use the powerful make of the artist and how a moat divides the phenomenon from the noumenon. The well-educated spectator will therefore be able to grasp its internal dynamics: the conjectural universe in which the rigid rules of the contract and the ceremonious behavior of the characters characterized by enormous wigs are ridiculously inscribed, the "conversation scenes" stretched out in polished and often captious dialogues, the cold acting of the actors (the names of Rossellini and Straub have not been wrongly mentioned) in that combed landscape that recalls Poussin and Lorrain, a photography reminiscent of Caravaggio's lights, a music modeled on Purcell, and the irrational and derisive counterpoint entrusted to the naked servant who at night pretends to be a statue and upsets the harmony of the garden.
Prejudicially hostile to realist cinema, heir to a sophisticated but acute experimentalism, Peter Greenaway reveals himself to be a highly respected author, who confirms the fertility of the British nursery. Although the Italian public may find it courtly and verbose, his film is stylized with a compositional coherence that demands to be appreciated. As befits a very learned “giallo”, where the intrigue is a metaphor for the simulations of History, and whoever deciphers them, after having enjoyed them, loses his skin”.
Giovanni Grazzini (Il Corriere della Sera, November 5, 1983)
