“The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” concludes the series of films made by Peter Greenaway in the 80s and is probably the best of them all. None of the previous films written and directed by the painter-turned-filmmaker can be easily forgotten by most viewers who dared to watch them. “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” is, however, the one that can make us forget the others. Like most really good movies, this one can be watched and interpreted on many levels, and it can stick in the memory in many ways. It’s a bleak horror comedy about a cook, a thief, his wife and her lover. It is a sophisticated story in the baroque and decadent setting of a restaurant and its labyrinthine kitchen reminiscent of an alchemist’s workshop. It is an art film designed by multimedia artists with vast knowledge of art and music. It’s a political film about 1980s England. It’s a film about food and gluttony, sex and death. It’s close to pornography. It’s a decadent masterpiece by Peter Greenaway.
The film starts with a curtain opening and ends with another curtain closing to suggest to the audience that they are witnessing a performance in which it is not prudent to get involved. Mob boss Albert Spica has just purchased or perhaps violently taken over the luxury restaurant “La Hollandaise” run by French chef Richard. He comes every night with his band of thugs and his beautiful wife Georgina. Albert is a vulgar brat who behaves violently and bullies everyone including the staff and customers of the place and Georgina. The woman gets bored and starts exchanging languid glances with a man eating alone at another table with a stack of books he’s reading from. We will learn that the man’s name is Michael. One evening later, Michael and Georgina meet in the restaurant toilet for a party of passionate sex, followed by other similar encounters in the following evenings, in the kitchen, with Richard’s complicity. When Albert discovers what is going on, his reaction is terrible. So will be the reaction to the reaction.
As in all the films of that period in the creation of Peter Greenaway, the cinematography and the soundtrack play very important roles. The cinematography belongs to Sacha Vierny who composes real paintings with references to the works of the Flemish masters. There’s a lot of sex and food in this movie, constantly bordering on violence and death, and it’s all shot with much voluptuousness. As in other Greenaway films, there is a virtual instrument that marks time. In this case this role is played by the menus of the day at the high-class restaurant. The music is composed by Michael Nyman who incorporated, among other things, arrangements of Henry Purcell’s music and his own composition ‘Memorial’ from 1985, dedicated to the victims of the catastrophe at the stadium of the Liverpool football team. The quartet of leading roles is played by four actors who were already established names when they took the risk of acting in this film. Helen Mirren is the best known today, as her career continued to skyrocket in the decades that followed. Michael Gambon and Alan Howard were also well-known actors in England, including big roles in the most serious versions of Shakespeare’s plays, while Richard Bohringer was a rising actor in French cinema who had already worked with Truffaut and Lelouch. The viewing of “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” ends with the feeling that we have witnessed a wonderful, disturbing and complex creation, and that a second or more viewings are necessary to decipher and savor all its poisoned secrets.