The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover began with a steadily rising crane shot, but some of its most beautiful and startling moments derive from horizontal tracking shots that run parallel to the action, or ‘picture plane’ of the film. The camera takes in the premodern, artisan bustle of the kitchen, and then ghosts through a wall to reveal the contemporary spectacle of the restaurant itself. Most disconcerting of all, we – courtesy of the lens – follow Georgina via a service corridor into the ladies’ rest room, at which point her dress miraculously changes from scarlet to white. Is this a clinical purity that vainly hopes to disguise the messy ‘end process’ of all eating and drinking? The film is as much about appetite as greed, and the vulnerability of the body in desire, an ancient agenda that may finally upstage the transient politics of the 1980s. Greenaway defends his strict camera regime: ‘When [my] camera moves, it moves in a very, very subjective, inorganic way. Which again is very much against the general premise of American moviemaking [which is] … psychodrama realism. … This wretched psychodrama permeates the whole of American culture’ (Smith 1990: 59–60).
An obvious objection here is that Albert Spica is by any standards a pretty ‘psychodramatic’ creation, the figure in whom Greenaway wanted ‘to create deliberately, almost in a technical way, a character of great evil, who had no redeeming features. Not like a Machiavelli or a Richard III, who have charisma, which is attractive. I had to create a man who had to be mediocre. And there’s a way that all my heroes are mediocre people’ (Smith 1990: 58). But the great paradox of Brechtian estrangement theory, in film as in theatre, is that we must be interested in the characters at some level, however banal, ‘modest’ or monstrous they are. Brecht’s intention with his ‘alienation-effects’ was to make us interested in his characters in a different, more critical and reflective way. There are a number of undeniably powerful, humanly engaging performances in The Cook, given by actors who fully committed themselves to Greenaway’s unsettling vision: Michael Gambon’s Spica, Helen Mirren’s Georgina, and Tim Roth’s Mitchel, as well as many by the supporting cast. Greenaway has said that he would rather spend time with his cinematographer – the late, prodigiously gifted, Sacha Vierny, who had worked on Alain Renais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad – than with his actors, and the actors may therefore take a kind of revenge, by delivering truly vivid performances which work against the coldness of their director’s declared intentions for his vision of cinema.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is not purely European art-house cinema because it also continues the 1980s British ‘gangster film’ convention, which included The Long Good Friday (1980), Mona Lisa (1986) and The Krays (1990) (Lawrence 1997: 166). As in these films, Gambon’s Spica is not a wholly repulsive villain. Is there not a kind of monstrous pathos about this thief, as when he breaks down, shouting, ‘Kids, who needs kids?’ His horrifying assault on young Pup shortly after is perhaps partly an attack on what he wants so badly, but cannot have; Albert had also been a choirboy, once, he says, perhaps not literally, but implying the lost innocence of his childhood (Greenaway 1989: 40). His dependence on Georgina is total, as we see in the final scene when he begs her to come back to him: ‘I’ve – to tell the truth – been miserable’ (ibid. 90). Spica is the unsocialised baby that remains within all of us. His simultaneous dependence on, and violence towards Georgina is a perfect example of the paradoxical emotions of the unconscious. There is no greater ‘psychodrama’ than this, one which is even more disturbingly shown by David Lynch, one of the few American directors whom Greenaway can admire, in Blue Velvet, made just three years earlier, where Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth makes an atrociously ambivalent assault – if there can be such a thing – on Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy Vallens.
If The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is a metaphorical film, as the director claims, what exactly could the figure of Spica stand for, in terms of an attack on the consequences of Thatcherism? Spica as a graceless monster, ‘unleashed’ from the working class by the new economic regime, is as much a victim of the new values as anyone else. Alan Howard’s antiquarian book-dealer is a member of the cultured, professional middle class that felt itself to be increasingly marginalised in the ‘new times’. The true villains of the piece are somewhere else, forever off-screen, global corporatism and transnational capital, inexorably growing in power and potential destructiveness.
Helen Mirren’s Georgina surely escapes from the framework of social critique altogether and embodies, with great pathos, the consequences of sexuality and desire on the mature, vulnerable body. For Georgina’s magnificent revenge, the film gleefully takes on the conventions of renaissance tragedy and clearly provided inspiration for the grotesque finale of Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999), a vivid account of Shakespeare’s long-neglected Titus Andronicus, an Albert Spica for even more desperate times.
Nigel Wheale
Cast and Crew:
[Country: UK and France. Production Company: Allarts Cook. Director and Screenwriter: Peter Greenaway. Cinematographer: Sacha Vierny. Music: Michael Nyman. Editor: John Wilson. Cast: Michael Gambon (Albert Spica), Helen Mirren (Georgina Spica), Richard Bohringer (Richard Borst), Alan Howard (Michael), Tim Roth (Mitchel), Ciaran Hands (Cory), Gary Olsen (Spangler).]
Further Reading:
Laura Denham, The Films of Peter Greenaway, London, Minerva, 1993.
Peter Greenaway, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Paris, Dis Voir, 1989. Available at www.petergreenawayevents.com/petergreenaway.html (accessed 22 November 2012).
Amy Lawrence, The Films of Peter Greenaway, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Gavin Smith, ‘Food for Thought’, interview with Peter Greenaway, Film Comment 26/3: 54–61, 1990.
Michael Walsh, ‘Allegories of Thatcherism: the films of Peter Greenaway’, pp. 255–77 in Lester Freidman (ed.) British Cinema and Thatcherism, London, UCL Press, 1990.
Nigel Wheale, ‘Televising Hell: Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway’s TV Dante’, pp. 163–88 in Wheale, The Postmodern Arts, London and New York, Routledge, 1995.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.