Even among those who’d call themselves fans (myself included), I expect most will admit that Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway is an acquired taste. His work actively defies traditional mainstream conventions. Greenaway makes art films, the type best appreciated in a museum setting rather than a multiplex.

To that end, Greenaway’s 1985 A Zed & Two Noughts is not necessarily one of his best offerings. However, as his third feature-length project, it set the template for what would become Greenaway’s signature style, and is filled with many fascinating elements that can drive certain viewers to obsession. If you land onto his wavelength, the first thing you’ll want to do after watching a Greenaway film is immediately cue it up to watch again, so as to catch the plethora of details you missed the first time and try harder to piece together the puzzle that’s been spilled out before you.

If, on the other hand, you expect a movie to have characters you might care about or a coherent plot that makes any sort of rational sense, I can fully understand why something like A Zed & Two Noughts would feel like an interminable slog. Honestly, I can’t begrudge anyone that reaction.

Title:	A Zed & Two Noughts (a.k.a. ZOO)
Year of Release:	1985
Director:	Peter Greenaway
Watched On:	Blu-ray
Also Available On:	Kanopy Amazon Prime Video (rental)

You hardly need to read his bio to recognize that Peter Greenaway got his start as a painter first before branching into cinema. His films feel like moving paintings. His early directorial career was built on many experimental short subjects that eventually culminated with a feature called The Falls in 1980. A three-hour faux documentary comprised of 92 individual parts, The Falls was less a movie than an endurance test. I’ve tried to watch it on a couple occasions but honestly have never gotten all the way through it.

Greenaway then made his first real mark on the art film scene with his 1982 The Draughtsman’s Contract. The period drama and (sort-of) murder mystery had at least a slightly more conventional narrative backbone, albeit enacted in highly exaggerated, parodic terms and with a rigidly formalistic structure that made critics take note.

A Zed & Two Noughts followed in 1985 and was Greenaway’s first collaboration with French cinematographer Sacha Vierny, who helped the director develop a new visual language to support the many ideas and themes and images bursting forth from his imagination. Greenaway and Vierny would work together on seven subsequent films, until the latter’s death in 2001. Their partnership produced a style and film grammar immediately recognizable as their own. In most fans’ estimation, that period represented the peak of Greenaway’s artistic output.

Attempting to summarize the plot of A Zed & Two Noughts is almost a fool’s errand. The essence of it is that twin zoologists Oswald and Oliver Deuce (played by real brothers, though not twins, Brian and Eric Deacon) are left distraught when both their wives are killed in a freak car accident caused by a rogue swan just outside the entrance to the zoo where they work. In their grief, the brothers retreat into a series of obsessive-compulsive behaviors, the primary of which is making time-lapse photographic films of dead animals to document their decomposition.

A woman named Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol) was driver of the car on that fateful night, and may or may not be the mother-in-law to one of the boys (I’m not entirely certain). Alba survives the accident but loses a leg, and then later has the other removed as well because her surgeon is psychotic and wants to turn her into a living piece of art. She hardly seems much bothered by this, and neither are the boys, both of whom begin affairs with Alba and somehow simultaneously impregnate her with separate babies. Meanwhile, both brothers also have regular relations with a prostitute and aspiring novelist named Venus De Milo (Frances Barber) – who, despite the name, isn’t an amputee. Like many things in the film, why Venus hangs around the zoo so much is frankly a little baffling.

The plot gets vastly more complicated than any of that, but describing more of it will probably sound like the ramblings of a lunatic. A Zed & Two Noughts is not the type of movie you watch for its story, which can be maddeningly obtuse and unabashedly pretentious. Scenes jump around in jarring spurts, as if assembled slightly out of order, and none of the characters ever exhibit relatable human behavior. Thus, it’s almost impossible to feel empathy or sympathy for them. The characters are ciphers whose purpose is to illustrate concepts and themes on the director’s mind. Among those are: the origins of life and the mechanical workings of death, symmetry and duality, bodily dysmorphia, the art of Johannes Vermeer, the Brothers Quay, the function of light, the movement of time, and the critical importance of snails to the Earth’s ecology. Plus maybe a few hundred more things I can barely begin to catalogue.

In fact, cataloging his own thoughts and obsessions is Peter Greenaway’s top priority as an artist and filmmaker. A Zed & Two Noughts was never a story he needed to tell. The film is an experience, purposefully designed to overwhelm a viewer’s senses and mental faculties. The elaborately cluttered art direction, self-consciously over-stylized use of color and composition, and abundant full-frontal nudity (of both genders) are edited to a propulsive Minimalist score by composer Michael Nyman to create an artistic fusion that no other medium but cinema can accomplish.

Greenaway needed a few more films to perfect this formula with his best-known effort, 1989’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. If not quite as successful as that one, either commercially or artistically, A Zed & Two Noughts clearly lays the groundwork that would lead there. The two pieces are unmistakably the work of a filmmaker with a very distinct and unique cinematic voice.

The Blu-ray

For many years, Peter Greenaway suffered from a malady I like to call Bad Video Karma. His films were financed by a host of small, mostly foreign production labels, leading to a messy tangle of competing distribution rights. During most of the VHS, Laserdisc, and early DVD eras, many of Greenaway’s movies never saw official home video release in the American market, and those few that did typically received lousy video transfers. Things were hardly much better in the UK, until BFI made a concerted effort in the early 2000s to wrangle the rights to as many Greenaway films as possible and finally release them in decent quality editions.

BFI released A Zed & Two Noughts on a PAL-format DVD in 2004, followed by a Blu-ray upgrade (at the proper 24 fps frame rate) in 2010. The film eventually made its American Blu-ray debut via Kino Lorber in 2023, packaged in a double-feature with Greenaway’s The Falls. Nonetheless, I acquired the original BFI disc before that happened, and that’s the copy I watched for this viewing. All the information I can find states that Kino licensed BFI’s video master, and the two discs should be of equivalent quality.

The BFI Blu-ray was authored without region coding and should function in any American Blu-ray player. The disc is transferred at a mildly pillarboxed 1.66:1 aspect ratio from 35mm Interpositive and Internegative film elements with a moderate but manageable amount of speckling and wear. Despite that, the picture is adequately sharp for the most part. Grain is typically light, but becomes decidedly noisier in dark scenes. Colors are decent but I’m sure could be more vibrant. More distracting, in my opinion, the image looks too bright in general, flattening contrast. However, even with these issues, the disc is quite watchable on the whole.

The movie’s soundtrack is provided in PCM 2.0 mono format. Michael Nyman’s score takes priority, for obvious reasons. Sound clarity is fine enough, though because it’s limited to mono, I’m left wishing for more breadth and depth. Meanwhile, the track also exposes how obviously most of the dialogue was replaced by ADR in a majority of scenes.

The BFI Blu-ray came packaged with a booklet featuring a brief essay by Peter Greenaway, vintage 1985 reviews and interviews originally published in Monthly Film Bulletin, and a short biography by film professor Marcia Landy. On disc can be found a 7-minute “introduction” (really an interview) with Greenaway, an audio commentary by the director, a trailer, some raw behind-the-scenes footage confusingly labeled Extracts from ?0, ZOO!, and a copy of Greenaway’s 1983 short film The Sea in their Blood.

In addition to The Falls (not present here), the later Kino Blu-ray appears to offer a different selection of early Greenaway shorts in its supplement package.