User Reviews

Spoilers follow, but it hardly matters.

Cosmetic amputation, timelapse of rotting corpses. siamese twins fathering twins, bias against black and white animals, a crooked vet who is a Vermeer counterfeiter, and multiple suicides all to children's music. Forget all that. It is just a framework for lush compositions and an ornate allegorical framework.

Pretentious? Preposterous? Predicatory? Naah. This is a wonderful film, much richer symbolically than `Cook,' a stronger narrative than `Drowning,' better photography and music than `Belly,' of the following year. A good Greenaway is something to be relished.

Which is the best Greenaway? This is the best start, I think. `Prospero's Books' and `The Pillow Book' are the most accomplished without compromise. I rank this with `The Draughtsman's Contract,' and `Drowning by Numbers;' all three have concessions to an understandable narrative. `The Falls' is a must, but takes discipline.

But with this film, he has temporarily abandoned the layering and successive self-referential annotation that is his most unique contribution to the art. The only such effort is the thread of a film about the origin of life that is interwoven. One twin searches it for the red herring among the clues, the red herring that explains the trumping of randomness over purpose.

Before viewing, it helps to view the 26 Vermeer paintings.

ZOO is a film based upon the symmetry involved in nature. Two brothers (born as Siamese twins now separated) both lose their wives in a car crash caused by a pregnant swan flying into their car. It turns out that both women were expecting. The two brothers both mourn the passing of their wives and unborn children and become increasing obsessed with life and death, particularly the transition between the two states. The Brothers happen to both work in a zoo as vets and use the zoos equipment in ever more bizarre experiments to observe the process of decay via time lapse photography (the results of which are shown frequently throughout the movie).

The film progresses via a series of well thought out scenes, the visual content of which are more important than either the action or the plot. Greenway continues to explore the necessity of symmetry in nature and also its artistic merit. This however, is a subterfuge for the real meaning of the film, which is the realization of man that he lives alone in a Godless and empty universe where life and both its beginning and ending seem purposeless.

A visual feast but a little pretentious.a bit like this message really.

How does one define oddness? I'd suggest by starting with two words: Peter Greenaway. You can also use those two words to define "Unique cinema visions," "total control," "beautiful views" and "don't mess with me." Greenaway is his own world, and you're either eager for a visit or you'll insist on staying off the space ship. I'd suggest you prepare for your visit by packing away any compulsion you might have to explain things...such as his meaning, his importance...all those categories, lists and twos of things...and your own squeamishness. "I don't make pictures that have a sell-by date," Greenaway once said. That's especially true of A Zed and Two Noughts, where a good many of the things we'll see have long passed their sell-by date.

We start the movie with a double death in a car crash by a zoo...death by swan on a lane called Swan's Way. The wives of our two zoologists may be gone, but their husbands, twins and formerly joined twins Oswald and Oliver Deuce, will lead us on an exploration of grief and decay, illustrated by their stop motion movies. We will meet a beautiful amputee, soon to have her remaining leg off by a mad surgeon, probably for issues of symmetry. In addition to wet decay, we'll enjoy vomiting, frontal nudity, Vermeer, Greenaway's magnificent color palette, black and white animals, a white mare named Hortense, several interesting fetishes, plus the movie's unique chapter headings: Mercury, Apple, Prawn, Fish, Crocodile, Swan, Dog, Zebra and Escargot. Black comedy, indeed.

I'll admit I don't think I understood a thing about A Zed and Two Noughts. I started to read what some critics and fans have offered by way of analysis and found much of what they had to say, from my point of view, largely incomprehensible, too detailed or too dull. Greenaway is chilly, controlling and all about style layered heavily on top of substance. He can make Stanley Kubrick look loosey-goosey. I found a Zed and Two Noughts, in a perverse kind of way, enjoyable. I suspect that's because Greenaway comes up with such odd, intriguing and often disturbing visions. They can almost make you forget what the devil he's getting at. For me, Prospero's Books is a perfect blend of style and story; The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is an almost perfect match of style and story; The Draughtsman's Contract is an amusing overlay of manners, murder, style and story. But A Zed and Two Noughts? Well, I found it chilly, sometimes uninvolving and often amusing. I enjoyed it, more or less, most of the time. (I occasionally used the fast-forward button). If ten people can tell me what the movie means, beyond the old standbys of death, grief and snails, I'll bet I'll read ten wildly different opinions. That's no particular criticism of either Greenaway or the film.