product description

A surreal and iconoclastic black comedy. Three generations of women who share the same name - Cisse Colpitts - (Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson - have all discovered the same way of dealing with their marital problems. The senior Cissie has drowned her husband Jake (Bryan Pringle) in the bathtub, her daughter sent her spouse Hardy (Trevor Cooper) to a watery grave in the ocean, and the youngest Cissie sent her husband Bellamy (David Morrissey) down in a swimming pool. Needless to say, local coroner Henry Madgett (Barnard Hill) has some questions about this sudden rash of drownings among the Colpitts husbands, and again all three women respond in the same way: they promise to sleep with Henry in exchange for recording the deaths as accidental. Along the way, Greenaway often stops to contemplate his obsessions with literature, astronomy, and numbers.