Synopsis:
Albert Spica has commandeered ‘La Hollandais’, an exclusive restaurant where the chef, Richard Borst, creates elaborate cuisine. Albert dines there regularly with his gang of unruly associates and his wife, Georgina; he extorts protection money from Borst. During their visits to the restaurant, Georgina, bored and disgusted by her life with Spica, begins a dangerous liaison with Michael, a refined, cultivated diner. Spica takes his inevitable, bloody revenge on Michael, but Georgina triumphs by serving up her dead lover’s body as a meal that he must confront and consume.
Analysis:
Peter Greenaway’s films have always divided their audiences and critical response. But The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is a special case because, of all his films, it seemed to capture something of its time, and even entered the broader culture, thanks to courageous performances, Michael Nyman’s ‘minimalist baroque’ score and a very strange title. Greenaway intended The Cook as a savage satire, in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, ‘on the current British political situation. Since this is a movie about consumer society, it’s about greed – a society’s, a man’s’ (Smith 1990: 55). Greenaway is a very literate director, and there is also a sense of medieval allegory in the way the roles of Cook, Thief, Wife and Lover seem to represent particular qualities (Wheale 1995: 180), while the cannibalistic climax of this ‘contemporary melodrama’ took inspiration from the excesses of Jacobean revenge drama (Greenaway 1989: ‘Introduction’). As with all Greenaway films, The Cook is at the same time a rejection of the conventions of mass popular, feature-film cinema – ‘Hollywood’ – and is concocted according to its director’s own distinctive recipe. This is therefore a very ambitious project: does Greenaway’s highly individual aesthetic simultaneously deliver an effective social critique?
Just one year after the release of Greenaway’s film, the Berlin Wall had fallen, apartheid was rapidly crumbling in South Africa, and Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Elements of the world we currently know were taking shape. Within this longer view, The Cook can seem like a retrospective, even claustrophobic film, addressing a domestic agenda in peculiarly British terms, in spite of its director’s declared preference for European film style. The object of Greenaway’s satirical attack was ‘Thatcherism’, or more precisely, the perceived consequences for British society of Margaret Thatcher’s three Conservative administrations, first elected a decade earlier in 1979.
Thatcherism, partnered more grandly on the world stage by ‘Reaganomics’, broke with the post Second World War consensus on the economic regulation of the state. The brisk new agenda demanded: privatisation of formerly state-owned industries, utilities and assets to enforce competitive efficiency; reshaping of labour markets and trade union law, again in the interests of a freer market; promotion of the entrepreneur economy in order to break the supposed ‘dependency culture’; and finally, an assault on the privileges and protective practices of the established, professional classes and their institutions – legal, medical and scholastic. These radical interventions delivered greater prosperity to more than half the population, producing what the American economist, J. K. Galbraith, termed ‘the culture of contentment’, an unparalleled affluence for a significant proportion of the electorate, who therefore tended to become politically quiescent. However, on some calculations, at least onethird of the UK population became, in real terms, poorer than they had been in the late 1970s. The abandonment of the one-nation consensus of the post-war period therefore produced a significantly divided society, with increasing ‘social exclusion’ and a perception that levels of crime and disorder were inexorably rising. The impact of globalisation during the 1990s internationalised and intensified all of these trends and their consequent tensions.
The Cook strips away the armatures of society and social cohesion. The world beyond Richard Borst’s restaurant is portrayed as no more than an icy blue parking lot that services a rank of restaurants and eateries; dog packs scavenge the bins. The only effective law enforcement is concerned with food hygiene, the police and officials who attempt to empty two putrefying delivery vans. One of Spica’s goons, Harris, does worry about the consequences of their murder of Georgina’s lover, ‘the modest man’ Michael: ‘I’m saying the book-keeper’s going to get us into trouble – and he wasn’t worth it’ (Greenaway 1989: 80). But crime and outrage bring no real consequences for anyone within the privileged sanctuary of the restaurant.
Greenaway is a great explicator of his own work, and is very clear about his formalist, anti-realist position as a filmmaker: ‘Every time you watch a Greenaway movie, you know you are definitely and absolutely only watching a movie. It’s not a slice of life, and not a window on the world. It’s by no means an exemplum of anything “natural” or “real”’ (Smith 1990: 59). Statements such as these come straight out of high Modernist, early twentieth-century aesthetics, and to that extent are perfectly traditional, in their own way. Even the title can be read as a critical perspective on mainstream cinema: just three names would read better in terms of conventional expectations: The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. As an audience, we would know what to expect as we settled in our seats. But then there is also The Cook, a contriver of menus, surely a figure for the Director himself. The disconcerting title is an example of Greenaway working against classical film narrative expectations, and just as A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) and Drowning By Numbers (1988) were structured by the alphabet and number counts respectively, The Cook is zoned by colour: blue for exterior reality, green for the creative kitchen, red for the excessive eating floor, white for the restrooms.
Greenaway’s alienating, formalist practice is evident right from the opening credits sequence. A steadily rising crane shot of scaffolding beneath the floor of the sound stage on which the action is being filmed demonstrates a purely Brechtian manner by ‘baring the device’, by foregrounding the artifice of film in general, and this film in particular. Scarlet-clad flunkies pull back curtains to reveal the theatrical mise en scène, where two delivery vans, one for meat, one for seafood, symmetrically frame the action. The opulent restaurant itself is redolent of consumer excesses of the late 80s. Two of the decade’s style gurus were on hand to advise: Jean Paul Gaultier designed costumes for the waiters and waitresses, and Giorgio Locatelli of the Savoy Hotel, London, created fantasy food for display. Albert Spica’s table is itself a vulgarian spectacle, dominated by a massive reproduction of Frans Hals’ ‘The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Guard Company’ (1616). Spica and his retinue are dressed in amateur-dramatic copies of the uniforms worn by Hals’ officers, who were for Greenaway, ‘a gang of people all dressed up with nowhere to go’ (Denham 1993: 26).
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.