The Draughtsman's Contract (1982)

 

The Draughtsman's Contract

A good movie is a movie that stays on your mind for a long time, but is it also good if it stays there because you are desperately trying to work out what it was all about?

We are in England in the late seventeenth century where the artist Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins) gets a contract to make a series of drawings of the Herbert country house. The drawings are supposed to be a gift from Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) to her husband. Mr. Neville are reluctant to accept the job but when the contract come to include access to Mrs. Herbert’s body, he accepts.

At the Herbert mansion, Mr. Neville commandeers everybody around for the purpose of the drawings and particularly Mrs. Herbert’s son in law, Mr. Talmann (Hugh Fraser), is ruffled by Mr. Neville’s presence. For a long while, the movie is about Mr. Neville drawing, using Mrs. Herbert and arguing with especially Mr. Talmann. That is, until Mr Herbert is found dead in the moat. Mr. Neville is convinced he will be accused of the murder, if for no other reason than everybody disliking him.

Some time later he returns, has sex again with Mrs. Herbert and is murdered by Mr. Talmann.

Okay, clearly there is a lot more going on, but then I will be starting to guess and be on pretty thin ice.

There is an exaggeration in the movie that pervades everything. The dialogue is fast, refined and elaborate and, yes, quite difficult to follow. The outfits, especially the wigs, are even by seventeenth century standards big and over the top and worn everywhere. The foppishness is rivalling Versailles and while it makes the movie interesting to look at, it is difficult not to see all this as a point. Mr. Neville is the exposer of the hypocrisy and idiocy of the idle rich and seems to enjoy that he can commandeer everybody around, mock them and literally screw them over. That makes the movie an exposé of the foibles of the privileged class, something they rarely like.

When I try to get a step deeper, I run into a wall of confusion, primarily from the dialogue. Maybe my English is simply not good enough, but often I would sit back and realize I had no idea what was going on. Again, this may be intended, a lot in this movie appear to be there to confuse us, such as the strange, unexplained living statue, but then again, it could just be my inadequacy.

As a murder mystery, it leaves us mystified. We never learn who killed the man. Instead, we get a lot of accusations thrown around. Everybody seems to have had a motive, yet only one is suitable to take the blame. Again, that may be the purpose.

The more I think about “The Draughtsman’s Contract”, the more I realize there must be a lot more hidden here, that the story is deeper than the foppish circus we are served. That is frustrating, but also interesting, and probably a good reason to watch it again.

Another good reason is the fantastic score by Micael Nyman. At first it sounds like authentic period music, but there is an underlying exaggeration and even a beat that reveals it as a modern score pretending to be of the seventeenth century. It is quite clever and pure bliss to listen to.

Peter Greenaway’s movie has the air of a mockumentary, a distortion of reality to prove a point, which is more or less the kind of movies he made before this one and although it is not playing for laughs, there is a wry humour here that makes me accept my complete confusion.