A Zed & Two Noughts

When a car collides with a swan outside the Rotterdam Zoo, two women passengers die and the driver, Alma Bewick, has to have her leg amputated. Obsessed with the accident, the husbands of the dead women—identical twins and zoologists Oswald and Oliver—embark on an affair with Alma and also begin experimenting with the time-lapse aesthetics of decay. Densely packed with literary and art-historical puns and in jokes, Greenaway’s third feature is “like nothing you’ve ever seen before” (Boston Herald). 1985, 35mm, 115 minutes.