Written and Directed by Peter

Greenaway

At the Nickelodeon

"HOW FAST DOES a woman decompose?" is the first line in A Zed and Two Noughts, and the next two hours of this repulsive film are spent exploring every metaphoric, artistic and physiological aspect of that question.

Translated into American idiom, the title reads A Z and Two Zeros, which, graphologically speaking, reads ZOO, or zoo, which is the common abbreviation for zoological park, a place where men keep animals for display.

The movie is a series of stupid riddles like this, passed off as remarkable insights into the soul of man. Zed indeed takes place at a zoo, where two brothers work as animal behaviorists. Writer and director Peter Greenaway uses this setting as an excuse to pursue noxious surrealist puzzles, revolving around such contradistinctive concepts as black/white, death/life, healing/torture, etc.

The premise of the picture is that the two brothers have both lost their wives in an accident caused when a swan flew in front of their car. The car was driven by a Belgian woman (Andrea Ferreol) who survives the crash, only to have her right leg amputated by the zoo's sadistic veterinarian. Before her other leg is amputated as well, Ferreol manages to seduce both the brothers and propel the picture into a series of more perplexing problems.

If it wasn't so pretentious and disgusting, Zed could almost be a parody of dialectic, throwing up (not an idly chosen phrase) contrasts and parallels that intertwine to infinite degrees. Instead, it is a celebration of decay and death.

The two brothers (who are actually former Siamese twins) are obsessed with death; they inflict their grief on the audience by taking elaborate, stop-action films of dead animals decaying. With cheerful music playing on the soundtrack, we watch crocodiles, dalmatians, zebras, tropical fish and the rest of Noah's Ark decompose before our eyes.

The obsessions don't stop there, though. The brothers want to be stitched back together, the no-leg lady wants to have a baby, the veterinarian wants more things to saw off. In the end we see a black-attired white prostitute head off into the zebra pens, with the fluorescent sign "ZOO" appearing backwards--a literal return to the "OOZ."

But to further analyze the pretentions of this perverted movie would be to dignify it to a degree it doesn't deserve. It's hard to imagine anyone enjoying this journey through decay, or to understand how the experience of watching an intellectualized version of Faces of Death could lead to anything but nausea. A Zed and Two Noughts is an angry, pointless film nothing more than stupidity masquerading as profundity.