A movie every bit as peculiar as its title, from British avant-gardist Peter Greenaway. It is a gorgeous thing to look at, beautifully lit and colored and composed. (The photography is by the distinguished Sacha Vierny, of Belle de Jour, Muriel, Last Year at Marienbad, to name a few.) All the more remarkable, then, that it should sustain such a level of brain-crushing -- if never quite eye-glazing -- dullness. It has to do with a car accident caused by a low-flying Mute Swan on a road called Swann's Way, killing the wives of two zoologists who were born as Siamese twins. A woman named Bewick (a "Bewick," for you ornithological neophytes, being another type of swan, not to be confused with the American automobile of another spelling) was the driver of the car -- a Mercury, but not rented from Avis: Greenaway missed that one -- and the sole survivor of the crash, but she loses a leg, and later another leg, and somewhere between those legs (so to speak) is impregnated by one or the other or both of the grieving husbands. What exactly the movie has to do with any of this is coyly, archly, deviously unclear. As in Greenaway's Draughtsman's Contract, there is an element of mystery, but mainly as regards what the mystery is: which way was the wind blowing at the time of the accident? and how long does it take a body to decompose? and where do these deaths fit into the unfolding pattern of life on earth? and what difference do any of these things make, anyway? Symmetry, evolution, decay are recurring motifs, but there is something stagnant about them: the time-lapse decomposition of the corpse of a swan isn't terribly different from that of the corpse of a zebra or that of the corpse of a dog, etc. The braininess of the enterprise is never in doubt, indeed is at all times frighteningly evident, and some of the word-play is elegantly, if pedantically, witty. Some of the rest of it is just "In the land of the legless, the one-legged woman is queen" and "Do you think a zebra is a black animal with white stripes or a white animal with black stripes?" Make of it what you can, and the best of cryptological luck to you. With Andrea Ferreol, Brian Deacon, and Eric Deacon. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd