A Zed and Two Noughts

Director: Peter Greenaway, Peter Greenaway, Peter Greenaway

1985 / 115min / DCP

After a freak automobile accident involving a swan in front of the Rotterdam Zoo leaves two women dead and a third—Andrea Ferréol’s Alba—with just one leg, the twin zoologist widowers of the deceased (Eric and Brian Deacon) become obsessed with decomposition, crafting time-lapse films of decaying flesh, and, alongside Gerard Thoolen’s unsavory surgeon, recruiting newly shared paramour Alba into experiments involving animal symmetry. A similar passion for symmetry unifies Greenaway’s films, and here he suggests the cycle of life as the perfect symmetrical system in a queasily comic meditation on sex and death, with meticulous, Vermeer-inspired tableaux masterfully lit by Last Year at Marienbad cinematographer Sacha Vierny.

Newly remastered in 2K by the BFI National Archive.