The protagonists are a pair of biologists studying the animals at the zoo, brothers Oswald Deuce (Brian Deacon) and Oliver Deuce (Eric Deacon), one of whom is seen early on listlessly taking notes of how many times a tiger paces back and forth without eating the zebra head lying on the floor of its cage. But they also spell out O-O-Z if you run them backwards like the film does near the end, and if you hold that up to a mirror and flip the Z around so it doesn't become a spiky S, like the film does at the same time, that spells Z-O-O, and a zoo is where the action takes place. The zed and two noughts of the title stand for Zebra, Oswald, and Oliver. There is an unmistakable brashness to it, for sure, one that feels untamed in ways that aren't always successful, with the caveat that "successful" is a loaded term in this case, very loaded indeed.Īnyway, it's kind of fucking ludicrous, this movie, but thankfully it makes it easy on us by clarifying very early what kind of ludicrousness we're in for.
I can't speak to that I haven't seen remotely near enough Greenaway. The director has in later days somewhat distanced himself from the finished film, acknowledging the gap between his intentions and his execution there seems to be a general consensus among critics that this is a not-as-good early attempt at what the director would do much more successfully later on.
The second narrative feature directed by Peter Greenaway (and it would probably be okay to put "narrative feature" in scare quotes), A Zed & Two Noughts from 1985, is kind of fucking ludicrous, the monumentally ambitious overreach of a filmmaker combining the wide-ranging interests and enormous reference pool of a well-read middle-aged man with the gung-ho enthusiasm of a relative neophyte for whom the whole "art cinema" thing is a shiny new toy (Greenaway was 43 years old when the film came out, and he had been making experimental shorts and documentaries for 23 of those years). A review requested by Mia S, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.
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