A Zed & Two Noughts, 'ZOO', Peter Greenaway

Z00 'ZOO' by Peter Greenaway Z00
"A Zed & Two Noughts"
(Una zeta y dos ceros)

Poster of the film One Zeta and Two Zeros (Peter Greenaway) 1985, ZOO, UK

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"A Zed & Two Noughts"
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"ZOO"
(Una zeta y dos ceros)
[UK, 1985, Peter Greenaway]
Duration: 115 minutes

=== THE TITLE ===

The title of Greenaway seeks to have several layers.

So even though the film we are dealing with is known in Spain and other parts of the planet simply as "Zoo", its director prefers to talk about it as "Zoo: One zeta and two zeros". The "Z" refers to the end of the alphabet (note the Welsh fixation with the lists and enumerations, referring to the ultimate end). The two zeros (which are also "o's" -or os?- refer to the void, to the nothingness in which the twin protagonists of the story are added upon the death of their respective wives, but also to their first names: Oliver and Oswald. And "Zoo" is obvious, the film takes place in one [in Rotterdam].

Phrase by Peter Greenaway

=== THE ORIGIN ===

The Quay brothers, those Europeanist USA filmmakers and animators [selection of their short films available on DVD and on Mulavision] disciples of Svankmajer were once actors. Exceptionally, in Peter's first feature film, a mockumentary called "The Falls" interviewed 92 survivors of a disaster selected because their names contained the letters "FALL". Well, here Stephen and Timothy played the Fallari twins (considered as one character, in the sixteenth biography).

Five years later, Greenaway was inspired by these brothers (identical twins) to shape the protagonists of "Zoo".

This film was presented at the Toronto festival.

Greenaway says that a film director from that country sat next to him there and became very interested in the story of this film.

Those who love David Cronenberg and have enjoyed his film "Dead Ringers" -made two years after the events that I now narrate- will not need any more data to make sense of it (change zoologists for gynecologists). [except for the tragic event that took place in Steven and Cyril Marcus' apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which is supposed to move and motivate the Canadian's film, based on the novel by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland].

One Z and Two Zeros (film by Peter Greenaway) 1985, ZOO, UK

=== THE STORY ===

The argument is simple. The wives of the Deuce twins die in a car accident. The brothers, zoologists, enter an existential crisis that motivates them to take an interest in Natural History, Darwin and the origin of species, an interest that will lead to the decomposition and putrefaction of matter.

On the other hand we have Alba, the one who was driving the car in the deadly accident, who loses a leg. This character will be the one that serves Greenaway for his obsessive ramblings about Vermeer, painting, photography and symmetry.

These two stories, connected to each other, alternate in turn with Greenaway's classic enumerative moments (the alphabet naming animal species with each initial), as well as with moments in which we see fragments of documentaries on the formation and evolution of life on earth (narrated - the film's enormous success - by David Attenborough... by the way, hasn't this film ever been dubbed into Spanish? At least on the DVD there is no option to see it "dubbed"...). Moments that, in turn, are related to the evolution of the main characters and their experiments on decomposition.

[NOTE ]; This is the director's third feature film, he had previously been working for years as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC. He himself tells us what he remembers of that period:

"During my ten years as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC - where I was actually doing British propaganda in the middle of the fall of the empire - I learned that a documentary tells a big lie pretending to be true and that fiction, on the other hand, pretends to be a lie and ends up telling big truths" ]

The twins go on a wild spiral in their decomposition experiments. The bitten apple as a symbol of the fall and expulsion from paradise gives rise in turn to the experiments on decomposition, precisely that bitten apple abandoned by one of the twins is the first to be photographed during its decomposition, it will be followed by the shrimp (with a comic scene included) and ascending in Darwin's evolutionary scale the fish, reptiles, birds - it is already said in the film that they are evolved dinosaurs -, mammals... and finally: man.
Likewise, the search for that lost paradise is symbolized by that green postcard landscape shown to them by Alba, on whose guard gate she rested her bicycle, which was filled with snails that were eager to liberate and soak up her sweat. There you will reach the end of the film, where the film ends with a triple somersault, the last turn is the fucking bomb of irony that explodes and comes off the powerful hand of the sovereign master Greenaway; wonder of end where they are.

Frame from Peter Greenaway's film One Z and Two Zeros

=== THE ACTORS ===

You know that for Greenaway, the actors are not as important in a film [as they are, in that order (I think) in today's cinema, for the editing, the music and the director of photography].

But let's not forget about the main actors:


Andréa Ferréol - ; Alba Bewick

Brian Deacon - Oswald Deuce

Eric Deacon; Oliver Deuce

Frances Barber - Venus de Milo

Guusje van Tilborgh - Caterina Bolnes

=== THE MUSIC ===

Peter Greenaway assures that music in the cinema is not respected or given the importance it deserves, that there is a tendency to call on a musician to fill two and a half minutes of sadness or a couple of seconds of surprise.

He claims to have met several times before shooting a single shot of the film with its composer, Michael Nyman, so that they could plan the themes of the film together.

Well, I don't know how it really worked out in terms of planning, but the results of Greenaway's musical compositions in general - and this one in particular - leave no room for doubt. A marvel, hey.


Let's also highlight the anecdotal fact that, in its obsession with symmetry, the film begins and ends symmetrically with the same piece of music: a requiem.

Frame from Peter Greenaway's film One Zeta, Two Zeros ZOO

=== THE PHOTOGRAPH ===

The Welshman's film follows a fixed pattern in terms of the representation of light: A-B, A-B [with "A" being light and "B" being dark].

As for the director of photography, another of Greenaway's key characters, let him introduce us with his words and talk about the subject:

"The director of photography for this film is Sacha Vierny.
This is our first collaboration. He's a great camera operator whose professional background goes back to Cocteau's time [...] and he gained fame by working with Alain Resnais, one of my heroes. He was also lucky enough to work with Buñuel on "Belle de jour".

A man with such a history and so much experience knows everything about light.

In this film there are many references to the greatest European exponent of the use of light in painting: Vermeer. We have compared how a painter illuminates a painting to how a director of photography illuminates a scene".

SEE LINK: http://www.seikilos.com.ar/zoo_sp.html


"Sacha Vierny and I decided to make a list of all the ways you can light up in a movie. In the scenes that were to be shot in natural light, we used the light of dawn, of dusk, the light of noon. They are all very different in colour and shadow contrast. But we also shot in moonlight and during very long exposures of static shots. We even try to shoot in starlight. It turned out to be a bit apocryphal, but we certainly tried.

Then we started with all the vocabulary of artificial light that can be applied in film and theatre. We deliberately illuminated with lights typical of the theatre and cinema and the variety is enormous. But we also use the light from car headlights, the light that reflects off the television using neon light. From the point of view of classic cinema light we also use Caravaggio's notions of tenebrism, we light with fire, candle and oil lamp light. In those cases, since they are the light of a flame, they seem similar approaches, however it is incredible how different all those lights are from each other. They all have a different complexion and temperature".

VHS cover of Peter Greenaway's film One Zeta, Two Zeros ZOO

A few sentences/dialogues:

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[This is Alba, the one with the amputated leg(s)]

"There was a legless whore in the war in Marseilles. She was very rich. She almost didn't get out of bed because she couldn't. Her legs had been amputated from her groin. Think of the men: no legs to get in the way...

She was treated with great affection and respect and had many lovers. She died young. Some thought she wanted to be buried in a short coffin. Others wanted to fill the empty space with flowers. In the end, the family showed up and put artificial legs on her. Imagine that! The body with all its delicate details, disappearing leaving a skeleton with iron legs".

* * *

[One of the twins asks Alba]:

—Why is your daughter named Beta?

—Alpha, beta, gamma. I wanted to have 26 children. Not beta was the first. The first one died. She had an infection mercury poisoning. In my village, they take mercury for abortions.

—There are only 24 letters in the Greek alphabet...

 * * *

[Venus de Milo surprises Oliver by swallowing pieces of glass and helping himself to a few shots of wine. Note how disgustingly cruel the English twin is to someone who just saved his life by taking his suicide weapon [and who had just kicked it out of his apartment naked]. This petty behavior throughout the film reminded me of that other English character, Mr. Bean, or the one from the TV series made in USA: Niles Crane, you know, Frasier's brother, that guy from the bar "Cheers" who later had his own series and etc]


—Oliver! What are you doing?

—Having breakfast.

—Put that down, asshole. Pathetic idiot.

—It's only ice.

—Ice floats... and it doesn't go with wine.

—Since when do you know so much about "etiquette"?

* * *

A memorable scene:

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The one with the twins eating at the restaurant with the Beta girl (Alba's daughter). The little girl hesitates to the twins about the colour of Caterina Bolnes' underwear, which she eats at another table in the same restaurant. One of the twins bluffs and is discovered by the little fucker, which puts him in a difficult situation in front of Caterina, who grows up and mounts a chicken in the restaurant to force one of the twins to accompany her to the toilet to lift her skirt and see the color of her panties.

This scene is already a little bit the obsessive germ of that later Greenaway's masterpiece that will be "The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover"-both with respect to the restaurant, still not baroque, and the bathroom. The twin finally accompanies Caterina to the toilets, where she wears a bright red dress that turns those white tiles in the toilet into an all-pink. And the rise of the skirt, discovering that she is not wearing panties, and the subsequent slap... memorable,

To Zed & Two Noughts

=== IN BRIEF ===

This is a work that perfectly summarizes and represents all of Peter Greenaway's cinema, a way of surrendering to the original and different seventh art, which is normally either loved or hated without means. In the end, as it happens with author-authors, this director is constantly constructing variations of the same film, he has that so complicated -and sometimes terrible- that we know as 'his own universe'.

For me, as a lover of his art, this film is a marvel, although it has several titles that are more pleasing to me palate.

=== SUMMARY OF THE SUMMARY ===

On one occasion P.G. had this dialogue with a journalist:

—Mr Greenaway, I'll be very honest with you: I had a hard time understanding your film "Tulse Luper's Luggage

—Cinema is very bad at telling stories: if I wanted a good story I should have read a good novel.

=== A BUT (silly)===

I'm going to put a "but" to the film, because it has struck me that this former documentary filmmaker has not amended in the comments of the DVD (made in the present) a big mistake that is made in the film when it is said - scientifically speaking - that the zebra stripes did not have a defensive sense of practice, because today we know that it does: They serve to mislead the lionesses by preventing them from identifying pieces in the chase of the zebra herds, thus making it impossible for the felids to specify where the body of a striped soliped begins in relation to the others next to it.


*EDITED 23/05/2020 - It seems that there are new studies on this subject:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0210831



Rating on the star scale:  [ * * * *]

Score____  8 / 10


And to comply with the symmetry that Greenaway likes so much, I close this review the same way I opened it, with a quote from the director commenting on this film:


"It is said that parents give themselves more to children who are not perfect. To those who do not see well, or who are less intelligent or who have some kind of disability. It's a kind of emotional association with the imperfect. And I think something similar has happened to me with this film. Although I enjoyed the theme and the beautiful images, there are still areas to explore with respect to the plot. So if I had the opportunity to repeat any of my films I would definitely repeat this one".

-P.G.-

Quote from Peter Greenaway

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Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Spanish original: https://elmaif.blogspot.com/2005/06/zoo-de-peter-greenaway.html