Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover, The

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is Peter Greenaway's best known and probably most commercially successful film, widely celebrated in its day as a condemnatory allegory of Thatcherite Britain.  That interpretive framework has long gone and today all we are left with is its shock value (in this respect it still holds up) and Greenaway's trademark reiterative stylizations made particularly unappealing by the unrelenting crudity of the content.

Principally responsible for this is Michael Gambon who excels as a boorish thug who every night over the course of the week visits an elegant London restaurant with his wife (Helen Mirren) and cronies where he proceeds to be offensive as possible to everyone including them, the other customers and the chef/cook (Richard Bohringer whose presence signals the film’s affinity with the contemporaneous French cinema du look), on the putative principle that as he effectively owns them all he can do what he f**king well likes (one is reminded of the yuppie in Mike Leigh's anti-Thatcherite Naked).  The wife strikes up an relationship with a mild-mannered book-loving patron (Alan Howard) and they immediately fall to making love.  The thug finds out, kills the lover but the wife finally turns on him with the help of the cook and together they exact their gastronomic revenge.

As ever with Greenaway and his regular cinematographer Sacha Vierny the film looks splendid but equally the director’s fetishisation of formal symmetries (abetted by Michael Nyman's music) and lush décor (with costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier) is hardly a substitute for dramatic engagement. Gambon is really the only actor who gets to do much but two hours of his oafishness is too much. Mirren is known as a formidable actress but for most of the film she is simply bullied or having illicit sex in uncomfortable places and has little active agency in the proceedings.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover may be a Swiftian parable for Thatcher’s soul-destroying regime, even of free enterprise laissez faire in general but its effect is similarly deadly monotonous and that is not a good thing. 

 

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