Don't bombarded me with how extraordinary, witty, intelligent....a masterpiece, or a must-see. This film actually is so pretentious, gave you an era of 17th century England, gave you a murder mystery, then in the end, another killing, gave you a naked guy in oily paint, urinating, mimic like a statue, sometimes on the roof, sometimes on a pedestal, or climbed on the gate. 12 paintings for 12 fornications with 6 each with the mother and the daughter. What were you trying to tell us? A screenplay mixed with ancient sex and murders? An early primitive porn movie in Shakespearean style? Or with Tudor touch? Yet this ridiculous movie has a magic power to make most reviewers wear an Emperor's Clothes, claiming how great, how deep, how intelligent this movie is. But I'd like to tell you, this film sucks big time! If you wanted to do a porn movie, show us some real flesh or meat, man. If you want to tell us a murder, show us some cunning moves how it was done. This film is like a fart, so stink, yet mucho reviewers told you it smelled so good and so lovely. No, it's NOT! It really stinks, man.

When I saw this back in the eighties one member of the sparse audience (not comprising of clever - clever critics,rather mystified filmgoers who had actually paid good money)shouted "What b*ll*cks!"at the screen and stumped out with his equally outraged companion who obliged with a loud raspberry. They had lasted a bum - numbing 40 minutes,enduring the arty - farty posing as art that Mr Greenaway had forced upon them,no doubt hoping to "improve" their narrow,blinkered,provincial middle - class lives by showing the narrow,blinkered,provincial lives of the 18th century English aristocracy as he conceived them. I know we Brits are to supposed to love this sort of arrant nonsense because,after all,we virtually invented intellectual snobbery,and nothing pleases the chattering classes more than that feeling of superiority that ensues from their declared enjoyment of something so clearly b*ll*cks that the lumpen proletariat reject it out of hand.I've now endured this tiresome film three times hoping to "unlock its mystery"as one of my more intellectually - gifted chums puts it. But it still goes way above my head. It's tedious and phoney and,frankly,up its own bottom. In my opinion,that disgruntled moviegoer thirty - odd years ago hit the nail on the head.

Peter Greenaway's films have characteristic features: beautiful aesthetics, Michael Nyman scores, grotesquely humorous plots. His first film shows his gifts came fully formed: 'The Draughstman's Contract' is a bizarre costume drama that displays all of his talent, while, at the same time, being arguably about nothing. Greenaway's films really are pure cinema: his interest in what he can do with the form exceeds any external message, and there's no attempt to hide the the sense of artistic experiment. They're an acquired taste, but in an age of identikit blockbusters, his strange combination of imagery, originality and plain silliness weaves a magic all of its own.

This is like a chestbox full of fantastical treasures, most of them pertaining to image and meaning. An amazingly rich film upon which to ponder cinematically on the hidden realities of the frame.We have the sketch artist at the centre of this, the man commissioned to represent reality. By this whim, he has the ability to empty the landscape of people or place them within it as he sees fit, which is to say the world he sketches is a replica born in the mind. What starts by this process as representation inadvertently becomes creation.But there is more to it. Within his image and unbeknownst to him, find their way various shadowy allegories which may be simple pictorial conceits or keys to a sinister plot involving murder and worse. By having sketched these anomalies of perception, the things that shouldn't be where they are, he becomes complicit in their implied meaning.The most fascinating thing about all of this, is that the film is perfectly aware of everything that transpires in it. It knows and points out that it does as meant to entangle itself in the folds of this so that it can be disentagled again.Tantalizing double entendres (some of the best in film) among politely aggressive dinner companies, an animate statue who unsuccessfully tries to mingle with the routine, sexual inappropriateness as contractual obligation, all these humorous or deviant stratagems mirror the effects of duplicitous meanings.Each of these elements merits a film of its own, Greenaway however weaves them together in a ribald pastiche. Of the pastiche itself I'm not too sure, whether the whole adds or subtracts upon the individual meanings, but it's an enjoyable one.All you need to make cinema in my opinion is not story or characters but a point of view (and of course the view to which it points). Two forms of consciousness, one which is the cinematic representation and the other the navigation within it. This one has several, each working upon the others to make them equally possible or equally moot.By the end of this, Greenaway rather fatalistically shows us the destruction of both creator and creation. At the hands of a spoiled plutocracy no less.