Word: greenaway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Greenaway...
...DRAUGHTSMAN'S CONTRACT Directed and Written by Peter Greenaway...
...hitherto unknown comedy by the 17th century playwright William Congreve had been discovered. Fancy further that his comedy was put not on the stage but on film, with every world-weary epigram and convoluted conceit intact. Such a notion must have occurred to the English experimental film maker Peter Greenaway. With The Draughtsman's Contract, which he wrote and directed two years ago, he has restored the Restoration sensibility. Here is a comedy-mystery laced with Triple Sec humor and stately, raunchy characters who are bound, by their social and sexual pretensions, to find an ordained place in society...
Toward the end, Greenaway's cunning conundrum of a plot unravels a bit. But by then he has made his point about the social power of the artist (whether Michelangelo or Mailer) in a society that wants him as an entertainment but not an equal. That Greenaway made this icily sumptuous film on a $500,000 budget, and seduced winning performances from his cast, suggests that, in art if not in life, the entertainer can exact his sweet revenge...