A story of love, lust and parenthood, born beneath a series of thunderstorms (the script by the acclaimed Welsh film director and screenwriter Peter Greenaway).
A woman, restless for some meaningful experience in the search for love, meets a man in search of sex. They both take a chance of finding what they want and sleep together in a thunderstorm. The man falls in love; the woman falls for the sex.
The woman meets a second man and is intrigued. They sleep together in a second thunderstorm, and, knowing perhaps now how to do it, she falls in love; he falls for the sex.
A familiar eternal emotional triangle has developed.
In the presence of the woman, the men meet, quarrel and fight. The woman makes an uneasy peace between them. Through her the men become intrigued in one another. The woman knows she has a choice to make. Take love but not give it. Give love but not take it. She takes a chance to find love a second time. On her suggestion, all three sleep together in a third thunderstorm. The men are mutually attracted. They seek sex and maybe love with one another. The woman retreats, persuaded to drop out of the emotional triangle.
After the night of three-way sex, the woman discovers she is pregnant and decides to have the baby. She is not interested to know which of the two men is the father. The two potential fathers are invited to the birth of twins, two boys. The two men become fathers without knowing who is the father – two babies for two fathers. As a fourth thunderstorm approaches, the woman leaves for a distant country, still restless for some meaningful experience, leaving the babies with their fathers.
Peter Greenaway (born, 1942 in Newport, Wales, lives and works in Amsterdam) trained as a painter for four years, and started making his own films in 1966. He has continued to make
cinema in a great variety of ways, which has also informed his curatorial work and the making of exhibitions and installations in Europe from the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice and the Joan Miro Gallery in Barcelona to the Boijmans van Beuningen Gallery in Rotterdam and the Louvre in Paris. He has made 12 feature films and some 50 short-films and documentaries, been regularly nominated for the Film Festival Competitions of Cannes, Venice and Berlin, published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Glen Branca, Wim Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Barriere, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik and David Lang. His first narrative feature film,
The Draughtsman's Contract, completed in 1982, received great critical acclaim and established him internationally as an original film maker, a reputation consolidated by the films,
The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover,
The Pillow Book, and
The Tulse Luper Suitcases.
