I Would Like to See It: The Draughtsman's Contract (Patreon)

A manufactured image, like gossip, has cachet as a form of reality solely by virtue of its existence. The drawings of the Herbert House executed by arrogant young draughtsman R. Neville (Anthony Higgins) are a sort of combination of the two, each one concealing a seemingly innocuous detail in fact composed as part of an elaborate psychosocial trap. The film draws its title from the onerous conditions Neville insists on including in his contract with wealthy patroness Mrs. Virginia Herbert (Janet Suzman), namely that he enjoy free sexual access to her body, but even this cruelly exploitative act serves to entrap Neville in a much larger, more nebulous, and more dangerous contract composed not of legalese but of social conventions and innuendo. The film’s opening sequence, in which dozens of aristocrats share dirty rumors and trade veiled barbs under cover of a genteel evening of merriment, lays out the very conventions of upper-class social maneuvering with which Neville will hang himself.

Greenaway’s visual design — from the careful framing of each shot along the same guidelines which govern Neville’s drawings to the sketches themselves, drawn personally by the director — is as unrelentingly technically perfect as the constricting social conventions of the English petty aristocracy. Even parasitizing such a stratum of people cannot succeed, for they are parasites by birth and not by occupation, and understand with a much keener edge of instinct the ways in which the host ought to be stripped of resources. In his coupling with first Mrs. Herbert and then her daughter, Mrs. Taalman (Anne-Louise Lambert), Neville behaves like a man making and devouring a sandwich unobserved, addressing the bodies of his victims/partners as sustenance for his appetites only. What he fails to understand is that to be seen to eat is declasse, a gross betrayal of motivations unprotected by wit, artifice, or dissimulation so as to enable the more skilled social maneuverers around him to lead him by the nose until it’s far too late.

Structurally, The Draughtsman’s Contract is something of a sedate and mannerly heist. We are made familiar with a highly technical undertaking, introduced to the social wrinkles which texture its participants and their shared endeavor, and then subjected to an overwhelmingly total twist and reversal. That it all happens, until its final moments, behind the raised fan of the parlor socialite does nothing to reduce the mastery required to pull it off. The women Neville sought to truss, pan sear, and rip apart are revealed to have been eating him since the moment they met, dipping their demitasse spoons into the soft custard of his social capital and ingesting it bite by demure bite until silver taps against cut crystal, no trace of the man remaining. Nothing left but lines on paper and a whiff of something gauche. Perhaps acqua di Parma.