‘The very statues breathe’

For the helmeted statue, it has been a long day in a saddle as hard as bronze ever is. Now, in the chill of a late summer evening in 1695, as a group of gentlemen in periwig and maquillage drift away, their murderous task neatly executed, he descends brazenly from the equestrian monument, his breast plate glimmering in the light cast by the small cache of papers smouldering in a brazier close by. He drops into the moat, and steps over the battered corpse of Mr. Neville, the ‘draughtsman’ contracted to record the views of Compton Anstey, a Wiltshire country house, a few days earlier, and whose final drawing of a riderless horse is, now, consumed by the flames. On climbing out of the water, the living statue is drawn to a silver platter on which sits a quartered pineapple, its flesh opened up to the elements. Picking up this exotic fruit, he buries his face in it, and devours it greedily, ecstatically, with his eyes closed. His mouth and nose are now miraculously pink, and the bronze make-up is running into the pulp of the pineapple. Suddenly this animated figure spits out the fruit in disgust, and the film’s end titles begin to roll. 1