ABSTRACT
Like all good readers of Borges and Calvino, Greenaway has a notion of the past that is more topographical than temporal, and so chronology need not dictate causality. Drowning By Numbers, it appears, was a script finished right after The Draughtsman’s Contract, but at the time the project “failed to get off the ground.” 1 Now that it follows A Zed and Two Noughts and The Belly of an Architect, any similarity with the film that made the director famous becomes vastly more suggestive with the hindsight of an intervening history. Is Drowning by Numbers a return to home ground – the English countryside – after two foreign forays that had a mixed reception? Or a heroic – Greenaway might say “gay” –effort, in the teeth of his previous protagonists’ pessimism and failure, to finish unfinished business and not leave drafts unexecuted?
