The cook is Richard Boarst, head chef and manager at London's high-class Le Hollandais restaurant. The thief is Albert Spica, a crude, thuggish gangster who has recently become the owner of Le Hollandais. The other two major characters are Spica's wife Georgina and her lover Michael, a bookseller who often dines at Le Hollandais. The plot is a simple one. Spica discovers the affair, tracks Michael down and has him murdered. The grief-stricken Georgina plans a terrible revenge against her husband with the help of Richard. Writer/director Peter Greenaway said that the film was inspired by Jacobean drama, but Jacobean revenge tragedies generally had much more intricate plots and involved a greater number of killings. (The total death toll in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" is only two).
In the eighties the arthouse auteur Greenaway was the enfant terrible of the British cinema. Films like "The Draughtsman's Contract" and "Drowning by Numbers" were slick and glossy but stylised, enigmatic and mysterious in content. "The Cook, the Thief..." is rather simpler, but still shows a number of arthouse touches. The visual look of the film is said to have been influenced by sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish paintings, something Greenaway alludes to by having a copy of Frans Hals's "The Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Militia of Haarlem" on prominent display in the dining room of "Le Hollandais".
Something which has received a lot of attention is Greenaway's use of colour. Most of the action takes place in or just outside the restaurant, with a different colour predominating in each area; red in the dining room, green in the kitchen, white in the toilets and blue for the exterior. A couple of scenes take place in Michael's flat, where the prevailing colour is brown. The characters' clothes even change colour as they move from one room to another. Another surreal feature is the boy soprano who sings a setting of Psalm 51 in which the psalmist begs God to "blot out my transgressions" and to "wash me throughly from mine iniquity". This may be a reference to the crimes of the despicable Spica; it would take a vast quantity of blotting paper to blot out all his transgressions.
Michael Gambon is perhaps today best known for playing Albus Dumbledore, the wise and kindly headmaster in the "Harry Potter" dramas, but here he is in terrific form as Spica, a character about as different from Dumbledore as one can imagine. He is a ranting, roaring monster, the sort of man who revels in the fact that other people are afraid of him because their fear is the source of his power. He loves a joke, preferably a vulgar one, provided that it is at somebody else's expense. Despite his crudity, he has some pretensions to being a gourmet, but is otherwise a Philistine. Even before he discovers that Michael is his wife's lover, he despises the man because of his penchant for reading while sitting at his table in the restaurant, reading being an activity incomprehensible to Spica. There are also good performances from Helen Mirren as Georgina, far more refined and sensitive than her husband, from Alan Howard as the quiet, bookish intellectual Michael and Richard Bohringer as Richard, the one man who dares to stand up to Spica, probably because he knows that Spica cannot afford to lose a chef as good as he is.
The film has divided opinion on this board, with Greenaway's admirers queuing up to lavish praise on it and his detractors, taking exception to the violence and explicit sex scenes, contemptuously dismissing it as "vile" and "repellent". Most reviewers seem to have given it either ten stars (a mark I rarely award) or one star (a mark I generally prefer to avoid except for the tiny number of films which are totally beyond redemption). For the ten-star brigade it is a complex, multi-faceted religious or political allegory or a metaphor for the human condition. For their opponents it is a pretentious, nauseating piece of rubbish.
Well, allegory, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. Greenaway has never said explicitly what the film is about, so if you want to see it as an allegory of the Fall of Man or a metaphor for life in Thatcher's Britain you are free to do so, although neither interpretation was one that occurred to me while watching it. (There were, of course, plenty of British films from the eighties that were critical of Thatcherism, but the writers and directors of such films were generally quite explicit about their intentions). My own interpretation of the film would be a more literal one, namely that for all Greenaway's surrealistic arthouse touches this is a psychological study of violence and revenge, just like the Jacobean dramas which inspired it. It is not my favourite film, but it has plenty to make it worth watching. 7/10.
In the eighties the arthouse auteur Greenaway was the enfant terrible of the British cinema. Films like "The Draughtsman's Contract" and "Drowning by Numbers" were slick and glossy but stylised, enigmatic and mysterious in content. "The Cook, the Thief..." is rather simpler, but still shows a number of arthouse touches. The visual look of the film is said to have been influenced by sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish paintings, something Greenaway alludes to by having a copy of Frans Hals's "The Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Militia of Haarlem" on prominent display in the dining room of "Le Hollandais".
Something which has received a lot of attention is Greenaway's use of colour. Most of the action takes place in or just outside the restaurant, with a different colour predominating in each area; red in the dining room, green in the kitchen, white in the toilets and blue for the exterior. A couple of scenes take place in Michael's flat, where the prevailing colour is brown. The characters' clothes even change colour as they move from one room to another. Another surreal feature is the boy soprano who sings a setting of Psalm 51 in which the psalmist begs God to "blot out my transgressions" and to "wash me throughly from mine iniquity". This may be a reference to the crimes of the despicable Spica; it would take a vast quantity of blotting paper to blot out all his transgressions.
Michael Gambon is perhaps today best known for playing Albus Dumbledore, the wise and kindly headmaster in the "Harry Potter" dramas, but here he is in terrific form as Spica, a character about as different from Dumbledore as one can imagine. He is a ranting, roaring monster, the sort of man who revels in the fact that other people are afraid of him because their fear is the source of his power. He loves a joke, preferably a vulgar one, provided that it is at somebody else's expense. Despite his crudity, he has some pretensions to being a gourmet, but is otherwise a Philistine. Even before he discovers that Michael is his wife's lover, he despises the man because of his penchant for reading while sitting at his table in the restaurant, reading being an activity incomprehensible to Spica. There are also good performances from Helen Mirren as Georgina, far more refined and sensitive than her husband, from Alan Howard as the quiet, bookish intellectual Michael and Richard Bohringer as Richard, the one man who dares to stand up to Spica, probably because he knows that Spica cannot afford to lose a chef as good as he is.
The film has divided opinion on this board, with Greenaway's admirers queuing up to lavish praise on it and his detractors, taking exception to the violence and explicit sex scenes, contemptuously dismissing it as "vile" and "repellent". Most reviewers seem to have given it either ten stars (a mark I rarely award) or one star (a mark I generally prefer to avoid except for the tiny number of films which are totally beyond redemption). For the ten-star brigade it is a complex, multi-faceted religious or political allegory or a metaphor for the human condition. For their opponents it is a pretentious, nauseating piece of rubbish.
Well, allegory, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. Greenaway has never said explicitly what the film is about, so if you want to see it as an allegory of the Fall of Man or a metaphor for life in Thatcher's Britain you are free to do so, although neither interpretation was one that occurred to me while watching it. (There were, of course, plenty of British films from the eighties that were critical of Thatcherism, but the writers and directors of such films were generally quite explicit about their intentions). My own interpretation of the film would be a more literal one, namely that for all Greenaway's surrealistic arthouse touches this is a psychological study of violence and revenge, just like the Jacobean dramas which inspired it. It is not my favourite film, but it has plenty to make it worth watching. 7/10.