Movie  1985
 A Zed & Two Noughts      Back      Home
Oliver Deuce: Pregnant women are notoriously unreliable. Especially when they're trying to procure an abortion.
Alba Bewick: Imagine that, the body - in all its delicious detail - fading away leaving a skeleton with iron legs.
Oswald Deuce: How fast does a woman decompose?
Oliver Deuce: Six months, maybe a year? Depends on the conditions.
Oswald Deuce: Does being pregnant make any difference?
Oliver Deuce: No.
Oswald Deuce: And the baby?
Oliver Deuce: How far gone was she?
Oswald Deuce: Perhaps ten weeks.
Oliver Deuce: Then you'd never know.
Oswald Deuce: [long pause] I cannot stand the idea of her rotting away.
[short pause]
Oswald Deuce: What is the first thing that happens?
Oliver Deuce: The first thing that happens is bacteria set to work in the intestine.
Oswald Deuce: What sort of bacteria?
Oliver Deuce: [matter-of-factly] Bicosis populi. There are supposed to be 130,000 bicoses in each lick of a human tongue; 250,000 in a french kiss. First exchanged at the very beginning of creation when Adam kissed Eve.
Oswald Deuce: Suppose Eve kissed Adam.
Oliver Deuce: Unlikely. She used her first 100,000 on the apple.
Alba Bewick: In the land of the legless the one-legged woman is queen.
Alba Bewick: I am about to become a mother, and you are about to become a father... or fathers.
Oswald Deuce: You what?
Oliver Deuce: You are?
Alba Bewick: I am.
Oswald Deuce: Good lord.
Oliver Deuce: You can?
Alba Bewick: Of course! Is leglessness a form of contraception?
Oswald Deuce: I'm not sure.
Alba Bewick: You're not sure!
Oswald Deuce: I'm delighted!
Alba Bewick: You are delighted!
[suspiciously]
Alba Bewick: A pregnant cripple and you are delighted? Think of what it will do to my sense of balance!
Oswald Deuce: It might help! Give you more stability.
Alba Bewick: Then you recommend it? Recommendation's one thing. A womb on crutches is another.
Oliver Deuce: So... who's the father?
Alba Bewick: Well, well, well. Why don't you discuss it between yourselves?
Oliver Deuce: Why, don't you know?
Alba Bewick: Grand dieu! Does an animal behaviorist need to ask such questions? As far as I'm concerned, you both are.
Oswald Deuce: But you...
Alba Bewick: NO BUTS!
[smiling]
Alba Bewick: You're brothers, aren't you? What's a few spermatozoa among brothers!
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In Peter Greenaway's 8-1/2 Women (1999), a woman's death propels a bereaved widower and his son into carnal questing, via a harem of idiosyncratic ladies. Similarly, 1985's A Zed and Two Noughts follows the Deuce brothers, zoologists and former Siamese twins, who lose their wives in a bizarre collision--a great swan crashes into a car driven down Swann's Way by one Alba Bewick (translates as "white swan"). The brothers become obsessed with photographing and measuring decay ("by degrees of grief"), from Apple to Zebra, and equally obsessed with voluptuous Alba, who, having lost one leg in the wreck, later has the other removed... perhaps for the sake of symmetry. Greenaway's funny, gruesome, gorgeous "zoo" also features hooker Venus di Milo, arbiter of the monetary value of everything; an amputation-happy surgeon who'd like to make Alba fit into a Vermeer painting; a sinister Phantom of the Zoo who offs black-and-white animals; and other assorted, often twinned, exotics.

Sacha Vierny, who shot Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad and Buñuel's Belle de Jour, visualizes Zed in richly erotic detail, every frame a feast for the eyes. Evoking melancholy pavane or stately funeral march, Michael Nyman's music marks the inexorable progression of a fever dream celebrating the power of artifice and nature. Trained as a painter, educated in linguistics and philosophy, Greenaway deftly weaves an exquisite pattern of puns, colors, images, words, ideas, and music into a cinematic meditation on life, death, and sex. Weird to the max, mesmerizing, and some kind of masterpiece. --Kathleen Murphy