A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS  1985. (A.K.A. Z00)  Directed by Peter Greenaway. 115 minutes. In English.
Shot largely in Holland, including locations such as the Rotterdam Zoo, Peter Greenaway's early feature film remains one of his best, and one of his most visionary.
A Zed and Two Noughts follows the Deuce brothers, zoologists and former Siamese twins, who lose their wives in a bizarre collision - a swan crashes into their car as they are driving down Swann's Way by a woman called Alba Bewick (translates as "white swan"). In the wake of the accident the brothers become obsessed with photographing and measuring decay "by degrees of grief", everything in alphabetical order....from Apple to Zebra. At the same time, the brothers become equally obsessed with the voluptuous Alba, who, having lost one leg in the wreck, later has the other removed... perhaps for the sake of symmetry. That's only the set-up of the storyline; the plot just flies from there.
Sacha Vierny, who shot Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad and Buñuel's Belle de Jour, visualizes Zed in richly erotic detail, every frame a feast for the eyes....and Michael Nyman and the Zoo Orchestra provide a fantastic score that almost becomes a funeral march. Trained as a painter, educated in linguistics and philosophy, Greenaway weaves an exquisite pattern of puns, colors, images, words, ideas, and music into a cinematic meditation on life, death, and sex. Weird to the max, mesmerizing, funny, gruesome, gorgeous and some kind of masterpiece.
One viewer's comment: "Cosmetic amputation, timelapse of rotting corpses. Siamese twins fathering twins, bias against black and white animals, a crooked vet who is a Vermeer counterfeiter, and multiple suicides, all to children's music. Forget all that. It is just a framework for lush compositions and an ornate allegorical framework. This is a wonderful film, much richer symbolically than Cook, a stronger narrative than Drowning, better photography and music than Belly. A good Greenaway is something to be relished."
This will be a high-definition screening.