Neville, the cartographer in the movie, is a painter who will not change his attitude towards painting due to any external conditions. He strictly follows the scene in the viewfinder for two hours a day to draw, which perfectly reproduces the scenery in the manor. The objective facts left behind evidence of the murder, which led to the end of the murder. Suddenly it occurred to him whether Zhang Zeduan was also such a painter. While accurately recording the prosperous scene of Bianjing from the countryside to the streets in the Northern Song Dynasty, did he inadvertently record an unproven crime? This is a joke of course, but it is precisely because of this idea that Greenaway perfectly combines the two identities of painter and director in this film, and thus won the best director in Venice of the year.
The painting
"Contract of the Draftsman" uses the standard of painting in the composition of each picture. Greenaway completely uses natural light, candlelight, and sunlight, instead of artificial lighting, making the picture full of blur and weirdness. It feels that it fits this murder mystery with no end. From the beginning of the film, under the dim candlelight indoors, characters dressed up by British nobles in the 17th century appeared on stage. Every composition fully embodies the beauty and symmetry of the painting, from the position of the candlestick to the static face of the character when speaking, Grenner Wei turned the camera completely into a camera at this time. Greenaway himself said: "The original starting point for me to shoot "The Draftsman's Contract" was to practice precise drawing, and it had nothing to do with filmmaking." The 13 accurate and objective landscape pictures in the film are Greenner. Wei’s own work sometimes thinks that he made this movie for the sake of showing off his pictures. So to a certain extent, to understand his films, you really need to have a little foundation in painting.
At the same time, his films have a strong regional character, calm and calm emotional expression, well-trained rational control, and are authentically made in Britain. Although there was later such a cross-border theme as "The Pillow Book", but At its core, it is still a British understanding and deconstruction. This kind of understanding is reflected in this movie in the context of gorgeous Baroque. The absolutely calm and objective perspective and the same simple and circular soundtrack make the cold and glitz correspond to each other. Michael. Nieman is Greenaway's queen scorer, and has collaborated with Greenaway for most of his works. His style of soundtrack is simple and clear at a glance, paying attention to the melody repetition and symmetry aesthetics in the structure, which complements Greenaway's films. The main story of the movie
watching
is a murder, but because Greenaway pays much more attention to the deconstruction of the picture than to the plot itself, this case cannot be viewed from a normal perspective, and even at the end, there is no way to accurately determine it. Who is the real murderer. The crux of the problem is how to find traces of murder through Neville’s pictures. For example, a ladder leading to Mrs. Herbert’s second-floor bedroom appears outside the house in the picture. It does not imply that Mrs. Herbert and Mrs. The butler’s secret relationship. In this way, a strange piece of clothing appeared in several pictures, like the owner of the manor, Mr. Herbert, and the body found in the second half of the film was also Mr. Herbert, but there was still no way. When you know exactly what, when everything is there, you don’t know how to explain it.
In the complex interrelationship of the characters, the secrets of intrigue and the sensual relationship commonly used by Greenaway are indispensable, despite the complicated costumes and corsets. Neville and Madame Herbert, Neville and Madame Herbert’s daughter Sarah, Sarah and her husband Talman, and even the hidden Madame Herbert and the butler Noyes, and all the reasons are because Both Mrs. Herbert and her daughter wanted to use others to give birth to the heirs of the manor for their incompetent husband, so everyone had the motive and possibility to kill Mr. Herbert, the owner of the manor. In several scenes showing this kind of sensual relationship, Greenaway used very ironic images to make people feel the hypocrisy and nasty nature of these pretentious upper-class people. In the end, it was the beautiful and arrogant painter Na. Weier suffered misfortune and died unclearly.
There is also a strange and weird "background man" painted in dark blue all over. He sometimes turns into a statue, sometimes becomes a background wall, and sometimes appears from the roof. The last shot of the film is where the corpse is found. This is the place where the thirteenth picture is painted. The "background man" climbs down from the sculpture horse, but there is no one on the thirteenth picture of the horse, which respects objective facts. The strangest place is this "background man". "It was also discovered by people in the manor who had mistakenly identified him as a beggar and was beaten. From the beginning to the end, I didn’t know the true position of this “background person”, or for the whole murder, although I knew that “the murderer is among us”, there was no way to point out that “the murderer is you!” But the original story It is also born because of paintings, and the characters also die because of paintings. You can ignore it while admiring the scrolls.
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