Film
Cinema Rediscovered: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
- Director
- Peter Greenaway
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 119 mins
‘Visceral’ porbably ranks as one of the most overplayed words in the critical lexicon, but it springs unbidden to the lips, along with last night’s curry, whenever a description of Peter Greenaway‘s 1989 cause celebre is required. Colourful entrails and mountains of carcases decorate many key restaurant scenes; two lorry-loads of fish and flesh quietly putrefy outside while the ‘updated Jacobean melodrama’ is played out; one character unwillingly eats a book, another is encouraged to partake of a lightly basted penis…
https://youtu.be/3zWrpy1D9Tc
Yes, The Cook… is another of Mr. Greenaway’s meditations on sex, consumption, excretion and death which goes as far as is indecently possible to erode the boundaries between them. For once, however, it’s got a straightforward plot: so straightforward, in fact, that the title just about says it all. Hence the claim that this is a Greenaway movie for people who don’t like Greenaway movies.
is needed now More than ever
Michael Gambon is the yobbish Cockney gangster, a moneyed Alf Garnett with gastronomic pretensions, who owns the restaurant Le Hollandais where he eats daily with his similarly plebeian pals and educated wife (Helen Mirren) – the victim of his private and public sexual brutality. Small wonder, then, that she should turn to bookish fellow diner Alan Howard for more fulfilling fornication between courses, with the tacit consent of the cook (Richard Bohringer). Small wonder too that the revenge and counter-revenge that ensues when the infidelity is discovered should be increasingly dyspeptic. This is not a director who pussyfoots around with his metaphors.
Each of the familiar Greenaway trademarks can be crossed off the checklist within a few minutes: the hypnotic Michael Nyman score, the elaborate tracking shots, the compositional symmetry and the fine art references to remind us that this is Serious Stuff. But it’s the unnerving juxtaposition of his coldly precise regimen with the vulgarity of Gambon’s relentlessly revolting Thief that defines the tone of this vicious allegory, which works just as well today as it did in the Thatcher era.
It makes a welcome return to the big screen in 35mm form as part of Cinema Rediscovered‘s appetising Gluttony, Decadence and Resistance programme.
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