Exhausting and brilliant, Greenaway's first feature may come as a surprise to those familiar with his more famous concoctions, such as THE DRAUGHTSMAN'S CONTRACT or DROWNING BY NUMBERS. Instead of sumptuous finery, set-design and colour, or studied, enigmatic performances, we have a, very local, documentary. A documentary which, like all others in the genre, seeks to examine realistically a particular problem in a particular area, through evidence, witness and analysis. A documentary whose 'real' elements are so preposterous that they develop not into an answer for truth, but full-blown mystery and fantasy, without ever moving beyond words and plausible images. What is very Greenaway is the numerology, the formalism, the very literary script, the arch jokes, the word-games, the nonsense-as-high-theory. Stunning, but you may not watch it again in a hurry.
Review of The Falls
