wheelbarrow walk - 1

 

this week’s theme is wheelbarrows (of course they’re rusty, this isn’t any old wheelbarrow blog, if you want one of those try http://wheelbarrowthings.blogspot.co.uk )

the title for the week is a piece of music written by Michael Nyman, one of my favourite composers/musicians – listen to 'Wheelbarrow Walk' at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_6ZUvOvnaU

the music was composed for a film 'Drowning by Numbers' written and directed by Peter Greenaway (another one of my favourites) to get a taste of the beautiful, but also, at times, grotesque film go to  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTLfuOQRiEI

it has been described as a “surreal and iconoclastic black comedy" in which three generations of women who share the same name -- 63-year-old Cissie Colpitts (Joan Plowright), her daughter Cissie Colpitts II (Juliet Stevenson), and granddaughter Cissie Colpitts III (Joely Richardson) -- have all discovered the same way of dealing with their marital problems

the senior Cissie has drowned her husband Jake  in the bathtub, her daughter sent her spouse Hardy  to a watery grave in the ocean, and the youngest Cissie sent her husband Bellamy down in a swimming pool.

needless to say, the local coroner has some questions about this sudden rash of drownings among the Colpitts husbands, and again all three women respond in the same way: they promise to sleep with Henry in exchange for recording the deaths as accidental (though none of the Cissies make good on this promise).

when the local gossip mill begins working overtime about this sudden rash of water-related deaths, the coroner’s teenage son Smut comes to the aid of the Cissies and organizes a tug-of-war, with he and the Colpitts women on one side and the doubting townspeople on the other (and, of course, a river in the middle)

along the way, Greenaway often stops to contemplate his obsessions with literature, astronomy, and numbers (throughout the film there are the numbers 1 to 100 placed in ascending order on display in some peculiar position - a fascinating riddle)

the film has been described as “Agatha Christie on acid*