DROWNING BY NUMBERS

DROWNING BY NUMBERS Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson (1991, LIVE, $89.98, R) The video brain buster of the year. In Peter Greenaway's fascinating puzzle picture, three women (Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, and Joely Richardson), all of them named Cissie, drown their husbands and are later pursued by a coroner friend while a boy named Smut concocts elaborate games involving fireworks, violence, sheep, and cricket. In this comedy of manners-very bad manners-Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) once again invents his own rules. The universe he creates has its own dreamlike logic and a sumptuous visual panache few living filmmakers can rival. And for all its excess and baroque style, it is the emotional theme-we always kill the thing that loves us, rather than the thing we love-that lingers like the taste of a bitter pill. A -Lawrence O'Toole

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