Cook Thief His
Published: April 6, 1990 LEAD: If the most crass and sadistic people gained power, what would happen to the social order, to art and, above all, to love? This is the question Peter Greenaway explores in his elegant, stylized and brutal new film. 'The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover' may sound like another civilized marital minuet. If the most crass and sadistic people gained power, what would happen to the social order, to art and, above all, to love?
More Cook Thief His videos.
'“^^The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover ~~“^The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover ’ (1989) ~~»*. Spica, who is an English gangster, has taken over a high-class restaurant. Georgina, his abused wife, meets and soon fall in love with a bookshop owner, who.
This is the question Peter Greenaway explores in his elegant, stylized and brutal new film. 'The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover' may sound like another civilized marital minuet. Greenaway turns this tale of a bullying criminal and his unfaithful wife into something profound and extremely rare: a work so intelligent and powerful that it evokes our best emotions and least civil impulses, so esthetically brilliant that it expands the boundaries of film itself. The notoriety that surrounds the film sheds more light on the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system than it does on Mr. Greenaway's work.
The film received an X rating for its overall content, and the distributor subsequently decided to release it unrated. But unlike most X-rated films, 'The Cook' has nothing sensational, pornographic or disreputable about it.
And though it is not easy to sit through this film, which begins by pushing the thief's most repulsive behavior in our faces, Mr. Greenaway creates such intensity that it is impossible to turn away from the screen. The film opens in a neon-lighted parking lot where dogs fight over hunks of raw meat, and maggoty fish and pigs' heads rot in garbage trucks.
Big Cook Thief His Wife
There, the thief (Michael Gambon) takes his vengeance on a man who has somehow crossed him, tearing off the man's clothes, smearing excrement on his body. It is a scene that quickly establishes the thief's character -worse than a maggot's - though not the overall tone of the film. For such behavior takes place in a milieu of sophisticated tastes to which the thief aspires, and which looks a skewed half-step beyond familiar reality. Though the thief talks and acts as if he has crawled out of a sewer, he and his henchmen wear dandyish frock coats, shirts with jabots and frilled cuffs, and jewel-colored satin sashes across their chests. While the thief destroys his enemy, his wife (Helen Mirren) sits calmly in the car, her face impassive beneath an extravagant feathered hat. 'Albert, leave him alone,' she says wearily. 'Come on, let's eat.'
' When he berates her for smoking, it is the smallest example of the belligerent treatment to which she is accustomed. They walk through a warehouse-sized door that opens onto a restaurant kitchen overseen by the cook (Richard Bohringer). It is an eerie place, a mix of post-modern pipes and medieval-looking cauldrons.
In this gigantic room, a boy with punkish blond hair chants in an angelic voice while washing dishes and a man cleans a duck, causing white feathers to fall through the air like heavy snow. To the right of the kitchen is the dining room, with bright red walls, carpets and table settings. It is dominated by a copy of a Frans Hals painting, whose 17th-century characters wear clothing remarkably like that of the thief's unsavory group. The film is so imbued with art and artifice that when the camera pans from one set to another, it is obvious that the fourth wall does not exist. And quick cuts allow the characters' costumes to change color to match each new room they enter. The wife's dress, which is red in the dining room, becomes white in the ladies' room. These visually stunning, ever-changing scenes could only exist on film, and the artifice is a great part of the work's effectiveness.
Release Dates
Greenaway's stroke of genius is to create a self-consciously false world peopled with character types who slowly become real enough to evoke pain and sadness. 'The Cook' works like a sneak attack on an audience allowed to feel safely distant for a time from the film's theatrical surface. And the plot takes off in an unreal way. Across the dining room, the wife exchanges glances with a meek-looking man (Alan Howard) in a drab brown suit and bifocals who sits reading while he eats. Soon, and without a word, they are making love in a stall of the ladies' room. Night after night, their unabashedly revealed sexual adventure continues, aided by the sympathetic cook. While the thief eats and belches and upbraids his gauche henchmen, the wife gains her escape and revenge by having sex with this silent stranger in the bread larder and a storage room strewn with unplucked pheasants.
The dark comic moments in 'The Cook' are rare, but they do sneak in at unexpected times. By the time the thief discovers this betrayal and turns his graphically detailed savagery on the lover, what began as a sexual escapade has become a sympathetic and loving bond. The wife's status as victim and her lover's as potential savior becomes clearer, and so does the way Mr. Greenaway has deftly established a conflict between the thief's inhumanity and the civilized values that the lovers try desperately to preserve. If 'The Cook' were any less explicit, that moral battle would certainly have been diminished. Greenaway's previous films have sometimes been obscure, but they have always looked exquisite. And in the best of his earlier work -'The Draughtsman's Contract' and 'The Belly of an Architect' - he has found the human center beneath his beautifully stylized surface.
In 'The Cook,' he is perfectly aided by some longtime colleagues. Sacha Vierny's cinematography achieves a heightened reality that never looks garish. And the composer Michael Nyman's beautiful, stately, elegiac score adds an immeasurable depth of feeling.
Gambon, best known for his title role in television's 'Singing Detective,' allows himself to be thorougly despicable as the thief. Mirren is astonishing as she gradually allows the wife's defensive facade to fall away. The cook's role is the weak spot in the script. Though he is meant to function as a chorus and witness, it is Paul Russell as the boy - part Shakespearean, part messenger from Godot - who fulfills that role best.
Helen Mirren Cook Thief His Wife
Greenaway has said that 'The Cook' was inspired by Jacobean revenge tragedies, but its themes and broad strokes suggest it is also indebted to allegories and morality plays. The wife takes a vengeful turn at the end that tosses all the film's questions about civilized behavior back at the audience. It is possible to love or hate 'The Cook,' but it is not possible to duck when such serious and important subjects come flying off the screen. IN WHICH THE MEEK TAKE ON THE SAVAGE - THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER, written and directed by Peter Greenaway; director of photography Sacha Vierny; edited by John Wilson; music by Michael Nyman; production design by Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs; produced by Kees Kasander; released by Miramax Films.
Running time: 120 minutes. This film is not rated.
Richard.Richard Bohringer Albert.Michael Gambon Georgina.Helen Mirren Michael.Alan Howard Pup.Paul Russell Mitchel.Tim Roth Cory.Ciaran Hinds Spangler.Gary Olsen.
'“^^The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover “^The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover ’ (1989) ». :W.A.T.C.H.