The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1999)
Cast
Written and Directed by
Produced by
Edited by
Photography by
Comedy,
Drama, Foreign, Indie, Romance
Rated
NC-17
120
minutes
January 1, 1999 |
24
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Rarely
has a movie title been more -- or less -- descriptive than Peter
Greenaway's "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover."
On one level you can describe the movie simply in terms of the
characters and the lustful and unspeakable things they do to one
another. On another level, there is no end to the ideas stirred up by
this movie, which was threatened with an X rating in America while
creating a furor in Great Britain because of its political content.
So, which is it? Pornographic, a savage attack on Thatcher, or both?
Or is it simply about a cook, a thief, his wife and her lover?
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The
thief's thuggish personality stands astride the movie and browbeats
the others into submission. He is a loud, large, reprehensible
criminal, played by Michael
Gambon as the kind of bully you can only look at in wonder, that
God does not strike him dead. He presides every night over an obscene
banquet in a London restaurant, where the other customers exhibit
remarkable patience at his hog-like behavior. He surrounds himself
with his cronies, hit-men and hangars-on, and with his long-suffering
wife (Helen
Mirren), for whom martyrdom has become a lifestyle. No behavior
is too crude for the thief, who delights in making animal noises, who
humiliates his underlings, who beats and degrades his wife, and
whosetreatment of the chef in the opening scene may send some patrons
racing for the exits before the real horror show has even begun.
At
another table in the restaurant sits the lover (Alan
Howard),
a book propped up so that he can read while he eats. He ignores the
crude displays of the thief; his book distracts him. Then one night
his eyes meet the eyes of the thief's wife. Lightning strikes, and
within seconds they are making passionate love in the ladies' room.
The sex scenes in this movie are as hungry and passionate as any I
have seen, and yet they are upstaged by the rest of the film, which
is so uncompromising in its savagery that the sex seems tranquil by
comparison.
Night
after night the charade goes on -- the thief acting monstrously, the
cook being humiliated, the wife and her lover meeting to make love in
the toilet, the kitchen, the meat room, the refrigerator, anywhere
that is sufficiently inappropriate and uncomfortable. (Greenaway
gives a nightmare tinge to these scenes by using a different color
scheme for every locale -- red for the dining room, white for the
toilets -- and having the color of the character's costumes change as
they walk from one to another.) Then the thief discovers that he is a
cuckold, and in a rage orders his men to shove a book on the French
Revolution down the lover's throat, one page at a time, with a sharp
spindle. That is the prelude to the movie's conclusion, which I will
merely describe as cannibalism, to spare your feelings.
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So.
What is all this about? Greenaway is not ordinarily such a visceral
director, and indeed his earlier films ("The
Draughtsman's Contract," "A Zed and Two Noughts,"
"The Belly of an Architect") have specialized in cerebral
detachment. What is his motivation here? I submit it is anger--the
same anger that has inspired large and sometimes violent British
crowds to demonstrating against Margaret Thatcher's poll tax that
whips the poor and coddles the rich. Some British critics are reading
the movie this way: Cook = Civil servants, dutiful citizens. Thief =
Thatcher's arrogance and support of the greedy. Wife = Britannia
Lover = Ineffectual opposition by leftists and intellectuals.
This
provides a neat formula, and allows us to read the movie as a
political parable. (It is easily as savage as Swift's "modest
proposal" that if the Irish were starving and overcrowded, they
could solve both problems by eating their babies.) But I am not sure
Greenaway is simply making an Identikit protest movie, leaving us to
put the labels on the proper donkeys. I think "The Cook, the
Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" is more of a meditation on
modern times in general. It is about the greed of an entrepreneurial
class that takes over perfectly efficient companies and steals their
assets, that marches roughshod over timid laws in pursuit of its own
aggrandizement, that rapes the environment, that enforces its tyranny
on the timid majority--which distracts itself with romance and
escapism to avoid facing up to the bully-boys.
The
actors in this movie exhibit a rare degree of courage. They are asked
to do things that few human beings would have the nerve or the
stomach for, and they do them, because they believe in the power of
the statement being made. Mirren and Gambon are among the most
distinguished actors inBritain-they've played many of the principal
roles in Shakespeare -- and herethey find the resources to not only
strip themselves of all their defenses,but to do so convincingly.
This
isn't a freak show; it's a deliberate and thoughtful film in which
the characters are believable and we care about them. Gambon makes
the thief a study in hatefulness. At the end of the film, I regretted
it was over because it let him too easily off the hook. Mirren's
character transformation is almost frightening -- she changes from
submissive wife to daring lover to vicious seeker of vengeance. And
watch the way she and Howard handle their sex scenes together, using
sex not as joy, not as anavenue to love, but as sheer escapism; lust
is their avenue to oblivion.
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"The
Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" is not an easy film to
sit through. It doesn't simply make a show of being uncompromising --
it is uncompromised in every single shot from beginning to end. Why
is it so extreme? Because it is a film made in rage, and rage cannot
be modulated. Those who think it is only about gluttony, lust,
barbarism and bad table manners will have to think again. It is a
film that uses the most basic strengths and weaknesses of the human
body as a way of giving physical form to the corruption of the human
soul.
Film
Note: It goes without saying that the timid souls of the MPAA's Code
and Ratings Administration found this movie too hot to handle. They
refused it an R rating. That left the distributor, Miramax, with two
choices: Self-apply an X rating, or release it unrated. They have
taken the >second course (with an "adults only" warning
in their ads), because an X-rated movie cannot play in most of the
theaters in America--the contracts with the landlords won't allow it.
We
live in a country where there is no appropriate category for a
serious film for adults. On the one hand, there's the R rating (which
means a film can be seen by anyone in possession of a parent or adult
guardian) and on the other there's the X, which has been discredited
by its ironclad association with hard-core porno. Why not an A
rating, for adults only? That would be the appropriate rating for a
movie like this. But then, God forbid, the theaters might actually
have to turn potential customers away! And so the MPAA enters its
third decade of hypocrisy, and serious filmmakers like Greenaway,
filmmakers with something urgent to say and an extreme way of saying
it, suffer the MPAA's tacit censorship.
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