The Draughtman's Contract (1982)

I am glad I took the chance to watch Greenaway's The Draughtman's contract a second time. What infuriated me the first time around (about ten years ago) I know found both ingenious and charming. It is an exquisitely beautiful film that follows the rules of the period drama with a tasteful grin on its face. The story starts off with a proposition to a self-indulgent artist. The artist is commissioned to make drawings of an upper-class estate. He complies, but makes his own additions to the contract: sexual services. As he starts his work, he takes painstaking measures to free his landscapes of all extraneous elements - with unexpected consequences. Gradually, we find out that the artist is not really the one who controls the situation. The film has as many layers as the characters have charades. On the surface, it is a story about a crime that was or was not committed - on another level, it is a story about what images tell us and the complex relation between the painted image and its context and purpose. It is a great achievement in studying artificiality, beginning from the domesticized garden to sophisticated social games.

Michael Nyman's music provides perfect augmentation of the story without being in the least an attempt to create "emotions". Because if there is anything this film is not, it is a film about realistic emotions. The dialogue is a further example of how Greenaway approaches his own type of formalism with wit and style: these fluffy characters talk in elaborate, long sentences that are complete immersed in the stylized social relations of the 17th century English upper class. What impresses me the most about this film is how it manages to integrate all levels of cinema into one cohesive structure of images, dialogue and sound.