MUBI

Note: The following review is republished (and slightly edited) from my blog, No More Popcorn.

Despite the fact that Netflix has a few issues they need to work out with their service (namely, their disappointing partnership with the Criterion Collection and upcoming price-hike), they are a fabulous source for movies you can’t find anywhere else. Every once in a while, they use their online streaming service to bring a tough-to-find gem to larger audiences, giving subscribers a rare opportunity to expose themselves to something really special. The addition of Peter Greenaway’s movie “The Cook, the Thief His Wife and Her Lover” to their streaming selection, is a great move, and one that’s giving them a lifetime pass from me. It’s the blind spot that I’ve been the most anxious to correct, since the movie has a pretty wild reputation, and it’s immensely difficult to find on DVD.

“The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” tells the sordid tale of London gangster Albert (Michael Gambon), who’s just bought an upscale French restaurant. He drags his lackeys and his wife Georgina (Helen Mirren) to dinnernight after night, talking loud BS about food, bullying his dining companions and generally disrupting the other diners. Georgina, sick of her husband’s abuse and public displays of bad manners, starts an affair with fellow diner Michael (Alan Howard) right under Albert’s nose, seemingly out of spite. As you might expect, the two lovers become emotionally attached, Albert finds out and tragedy follows, culminating in a final scene of cold revenge that’s icky, but so perfectly staged and dramatically satisfying that it sent chills down my spine.

“Thief” is known as kind of a shocker. And it’s true; it does contain some difficult material. Among the images Greenaway incorporates:

Full-frontal nudity (male and female)
Acts of violent abuse
Force-feeding of items that aren’t meant for eating (notably buttons and sheets of paper)
Cannibalism (only once, but it’s a doozy)
An unpleasant opening scene involving poo

While this stuff is pretty salacious, what people don’t talk about quite as much is that the movie is one of the most beautifully shot and stylized you’ll see anywhere, and it’s done in a strikingly unique way. All you budding filmmakers out there, take note: If you want a sure-fire way to glue your audience to the screen, even when (especially when) what you’re showing is controversial, disturbing or hard to watch, make it look as gorgeous as possible. Despite that I knew exactly what I was seeing, I never once felt I was watching something grossly inappropriate (pretty impressive, given the nasty elements mentioned above). Greenaway handles the film’s provocative material with amazing taste. Every frame looks like a painting, and I mean that in the most literal sense. It doesn’t matter if the scene is a dinner table or a tryst in the kitchen pantry, it all looks gorgeous.

Gambon is pitch-perfect as Albert, in a performance that’s both frustrating and funny. He’s crass, but wants to look like he’s got taste. He speaks at length about various culinary processes he doesn’t really understand (often with his mouth full). He’s the kind of diner who thinks bold, edgy cuisine is ham with pineapples. Mirren, for her part, is good too, although hers isn’t quite as raucous and attention-grabbing a role as Gambon’s. They’re supported by an impressive ensemble that includes Ciaran Hinds and Tim Roth, both at early stages in their illustrious careers. Roth, in particular, gives a wonderfully physical performance that has him doing everything from vomiting down his shirt to jumping on a table like a spider monkey.

But as good as the acting is, what really stands out is the film’s design. “Thief” begins and ends with curtains, as though we’re watching a play, a feeling supported by huge, lavish sets that feel like a cross between a theatrical production and a Rembrandt painting. The amazingly structured costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier change color from scene to scene, depending on the location and the lighting (green in the kitchen, red in the dining room, white in the bathroom). Scenes that Greenaway wants to give a particular artistic highlightare shot with a kind of flattened perspective (the dinner table scenes, for instance, frequently have people sitting on only one side of the table).

Of course, that’s all well and good, until you come to question the meaning of the film itself. It looks good, and tells a good story, sure, but is there an anchor of meaning that grounds the movie? Given its characters and conclusion, it feels very much like a more explicitly violent version of a play like “The Duchess of Malfi,” which reflected and responded to historical occurrences, class and religious beliefs held at the time it was written. In that same vein, “Thief” was seen at the time of its release as an enraged response to the politics of greed that characterized the 1980s, particularly those of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and those who benefited from her policies. Roger Ebert does a much better job of explaining it than I can—I highly recommend his review of the film for further reading.

“The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” is a strange cocktail of a movie. It’s difficult to watch, but glorious to look at. It’s troubling and angry, but also bold and really gutsy. It’s nasty, but done with impressive taste. It’s a movie that feels important, and I suspect that it would even if you’d never heard of it or its director. It’s an experience that may not sit well with the viewer, but it’s a movie that everyone should see at least once, if only for the conversations it will stir up afterward. Now, thanks to Netflix, you finally can.

Random observations:

I’ve never seen a movie heavily involving food that made the food look so unappetizing. Maybe it was the extensive variations of gelatin served, maybe it was that the food was abused about as often as it was consumed. I don’t know. All I’m saying is, if I had my pick of expensive restaurants to eat at, Le Hollandais would not be my first choice.

British TV nerds, take note: In addition to Hinds and Roth featuring in the supporting cast, the ensemble also includes great British “That Guys” Roger Lloyd Pack and Ron Cook, as well as musician Ian Dury (of the band The Blockheads). There’s also a fun little appearance from a young Alex Kingston (of “Doctor Who”). See if you can spot her.

A suggestion: When I first watched this movie, I wasn’t aware of its political motivations— the result of a double handicap of not having experienced Thatcherite England and not being familiar with Greenaway’s filmography. If you do read the Roger Ebert review I mentioned above, I’d suggest checking it out before watching the film for a little historical and cultural context, and also because Roger Ebert is just a fantastic writer.

Peter Greenaway es un cineasta de imágenes y provocaciones. Recuerden su película Una zeta y dos ceros (A Zed & Two Noughts, 1986) con sus imágenes de putrefacción y sus reflexiones sobre lo efímero de la existencia.

Podemos decir que en El cocinero, el ladrón, su mujer y su amante (The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover, 1989), Greenaway patenta su estilo y se convierte en un autor, término tan usado hoy en día en cineastas con oropel pero sin sustancia. ¡Hola, Michael Bay!

El cocinero, el ladrón, su mujer y su amante narra la historia de Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), el ladrón, y sus visitas diarias a su restaurante acompañado de su esposa, Georgina Spica (Helen Mirren), y sus compinches. Todos los días humilla a su cocinero (Richard Bohringer) y todos los días hace de la hora de la cena un espectáculo. Es ahí en su lugar íntimo que la mujer del ladrón encontrará a su amante, Michael (Alan Howard), un callado e imperceptible comensal que gusta de una buena lectura con sus alimentos.

Ése es el pequeño universo que crea y desarrolla Greenaway –también guionista–, apoyado en la excelente fotografía de Sacha Vierny y en un score perturbador de Michael Nyman. Es un universo que sólo responde a sus propias reglas, que sólo existe en celuloide y que no puede ser replicado fuera de éste, de ahí que cada zona tenga un color contrastante y único.

Son las pasiones de cada uno de los protagonistas lo que hacen caminar a la película. Todos sufren, viven y mueren por las pasiones que dan sentido a su vida, la esposa y el amante por la necesidad física que tiene uno por el otro y el ladrón por la comida.

Tomemos el ejemplo de este último, Spica maltrata a su mujer porque es infértil y su único refugio es la comida, sin ella no es nada, su hombría es proporcional a la cantidad de personas que invita a disfrutar la cena con él y a sus malos modales en la mesa. Es esta misma pasión la que termina por consumirlo. Así los demás protagonistas, al amante sus libros y a la esposa su amante.

Y entre ellos tres emerge un cuarto protagonista, el cocinero, quién viene a representar el papel de víctima. Su único interés es mantener abierto su restaurante, por eso acepta todos los días las humillaciones de Spica y solapa por otro lado las infidelidades de Georgina, pero al final –como a todos– su pasión de vida termina por volverse en su contra.

Podría resultar fácil quedarse atascado en el primer nivel de la cinta, un ser humano despreciable que recibe su merecido, pero el desarrollo de los personajes durante todo el filme evita que caigamos en el lugar común.

Cada personaje se desarrolla de manera adecuada, Greenaway le da a cada uno dimensión. Por ejemplo, Georgina Spica pasa de ser la esposa sumida a rebelarse a través del sexo, para finalmente convertirse en una vengadora sin piedad.

La atmósfera recargada, casi barroca, busca estimular al espectador. No es raro que resulten más provocadoras –y repulsivas– las escenas con comida que los encuentros sexuales entre Hellen Mirren –aplausos– y Alan Howard. Muestra de la capacidad del director para obtener lo mejor de sus actores.

El cocinero, el ladrón, su mujer y su amante mantiene las ideas que se presentaban en Una zeta y dos ceros: la incapacidad del ser humano de controlar su destino y lo fútil que es tratar de controlarlo, porque al final no somos más que un organismo efímero que se consume.

Cada uno de nosotros elige el veneno que lo consume.

Hatred. Fear. Jealousy. Scorn. Anxiety.

The intellectual often feels these emotions when asked to be a participant of bourgeois society, for the shallow, commercial culture of the global order pleads that he cast away his mind which he so cherishes. It tells him to love his slavery, and take the pleasures of the flesh and the transience of laughter for comforts. In time, he finds such aversions dissatisfying and continues on in anomie. He fights the world through scientific method and literary analysis, hoping that triviality and banality will not infect him, that somehow stupidity and acquiescence will not pollute his cerebral fortress.

But soon, he finds himself forlorn. Loneliness is no longer a sanctuary, but a prison. And as society provides no support for his development, he seeks the thing that is most socially encouraged: a relationship. After observation, it discourages him at first, the lowly state to which women have been forced into. Many of them, through the industrial precision of patriarchy, have been reduced to little more than showing concern for the material comforts of the day. This depresses him. Love, he thought, was one’s last chance. It is the way to integrate into the fold, to no longer be outside.

But he shortens his chances, as many do. If (as many of his kind are), he is a thinker from the middle classes, he may come to shun the hypocrisy, the complacence, the lifelessness of the women of his station. And though the working classes, as he observes, are still imbued with the lifeforce and creativity that drives mankind, they are lacking in traditions, devoid of the elegance which he detests, but secretly admires. Looking further into society, he finds his object: the bourgeois woman. Her qualities show that the petit bourgeois of his class are nothing but imitations of their masters.

His mind, of course, loves this new woman for her well-payed-for education and sense of leisure. From the comfort of her class, the world becomes still for him. It is temporarily no longer a chaos in his thoughts. Yet, there is another wall between him: class boundaries. he could attain his object in mere enjoyment, but feelings of possession take hold of him.

However, she cannot have him, as she is, rather. Upon scrutiny, he understands that what he is facing is a whole system. She does not belong to her class by choice, but by forces, and these influences made and continually reinforce her character. What he loves was made by design. And the small emoluments that sustain him cannot alter her inclinations. To have her, as she is, she must provide what she is accustomed to, or instead risk a change. It is, in a simple term, preservation. And for this, he grows more and more unfit for the world, more willing to change it. Desire drives his dream of overthrow. But the dream of owning factories or investment banks is an inconceivable as the Christ myth to him. And his hatred for the figureheads of patriarchy couldn’t possibly lead him to mimic the very system which chokes out his existence. So he decides to make the world go upside-down. He cannot beat them, and certainly will not join them. He will, rather, make them obsolete.

It is this impetus which I feel drives The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. While my introduction heavily politicizes the film, behind Greenaway’s baroque adornments lies a direction towards the radical. The man I described, in his acumen and uncertainty, is Michael, the Lover. Though he is portrayed as a victim of a raving lunatic’s brutality, his crime is that he sought to upset the order through the sexual act.

He cannot, in this world, engage in free love and have the bourgeois woman he so desires. She is, for the restaurant owner and the higher classes he represents (think of the building’s interior opulence and Georgina’s deluxe, ever-changing wardrobe), part of an exclusive society, in so much as this social unit views her as property, that is, more specifically, reproductive property. Her main function, in the eyes of the husband, Spica, is to abide in his home, represent him and stay faithful to him, thereby preventing her from fornication, and hence, humiliation for him and the further matter of ambiguous parentage.

Michael has a firmly rooted position as a thinker by his actions. While Spica and his minions are gorging themselves, Michael is seen reading (with no coincidence) a book on the French Revolution (subversive ideas are always on loan from foreigners). He probably prefers revolution in its French incarnation and not its Russian one, as he is not quite ready for full equality. And for this breach in expectations, the husband disrupts his book reading (for the model citizen should be frivolous, not brainy), throwing the book on the floor and cursing him.

The husband, Spica, is seen through Michael’s eyes, and not Georgina’s. Western film is often more manipulative than its Eastern counterpart. The Occident is concerned with identification, while the East prefers observation. In the West, Christian concepts of good and evil influence choices in narrative. Michael is good, for he is a martyr. Jesus against Rome. The husband, the bad one, is executed for his sins. And his barbaric behavior and personification of all things evil is represented by his red and black raiment – purely diabolical.

Given the timing of the film’s release, there can be speculation that the thief, the husband, is a stand-in for the UK’s corrupt, Thatcherite dictatorship. This follows the same line as my argument and is useful, but the cultural specificities of the UK and Margaret Thatcher are not. I see the film as expressing the eternal theme of the pre-revolutionary stage: corruption.

Corruption is the by-product of stagnation, when normal, decent democracy must be perverted to keep the ruling classes happy. Life as they knew it can no longer be replenished through legal means, for there are too many barriers. It is here that we see power encroach itself further into private life by means of the state (i.e… wiretapping, deregulation, police repression, the ramping-up of the criminal codes [such as the 10-20-Life policy in the state of Florida], and stricter drug laws). Now, corruption, in the common sense, is seen as a private matter, being that of markets, business, and industry, yet it can be traced back to the state. Once the state, in its Engelian function, fails to keep class antagonism from volatile levels, and starts to support power to the detriment of the governed, then it opens the doors for the abuse of power, by power – for corruption.

The world saw a crucial moment in the 1980’s with the rise of a new Conservatism, seen in Reagan and Thatcher, here in the West, and the subsequent attack on progressive gains, most notoriously displayed during Reagan’s first few months in office, when he gave a crushing blow to the strike of the government-employed, air traffic controllers. In the U.S., the governed were also sold out by the state which protects them from power. Tax incentives given to megacorporations, which then used the new boon in capital to penetrate foreign markets, assisted in the deindustrialization of the U.S., and the mass layoffs in the labor market.

Further encroachments on liberty had to be made, abroad and at home, as Reagan and U.S. power sought to defeat their existential enemy, the USSR. Greenaway’s film was made at the horizon of this victory. For America, and its bulldog Britain, no longer would there be a Red, second world to protect the vulnerable third world. And it is at this stage, when the West could still profess itself as having a destiny, that it can be, to its citizens, admirable. Manifest Destiny (here transposed to the entire globe) was complete, and the U.S. (Britain too) had no more future to sell to its children. And with “smooth” world, and the opening-up of previously unpenetrated markets, the population could experience a new, undreamed of decadence. But with no goal in mind, the need for great diligence and obedience was no longer necessary. Social liberalism can thrive. And the world as it was, was a completed construct. The ousting of “bad guys” like Milosevic and Saddam is not an expeditionary, imperial campaign, but rather, a disciplinary action. No other nation can fall out of line in this fixed world.

Therefore, Michael’s sexual defiance, is more intolerable in this stage in history, than were he to diddle Spica’s wife once the mission had been completed (when it’s time to laissez les bon temps rouler). Such trangressions are expected, but not encouraged, once an era of enjoyment falls upon the earth (such as the world of the flapper and the petting parties of the Roaring 20’s).

The wife, while seeking a more meaningful love, is still part of these historical forces. Helen Mirren, not as personality, but as an object (she is the only woman seen in the nude, the only one that desire is focused upon), is completely necessary. She represents a dying class, one that is about to see its success (world domination). Death, also, is a theme in this film. Richard, the cook, gives a speech on how black foods represent death, and in consuming them one can conquer mortality (from keys to the quiche). And it is around so much death, from Michael’s, to Spica’s, to the hapless employees’, that we must surround ourselves with life. A restaurant, fine dining in particular, is a celebration of life and sensuality (something the English should learn more of). Eating, like sex (seen in the film expressly) remind man of his impermanence, which reinvigorates his sense of life. Only in realizing death can we start to truly enjoy life. The set designers, knowing this, draped the restaurant’s interiors in warm, yonic reds, representing sex, the flesh, and ultimately, demise. It is in this coming end (so quietly suggested in Mirren’s, or Greenaway’s, refusal to let Georgina use the makeup brush – an aging woman belonging to a soon-to-be obsolete class), that the film so lavishly gorges on all things representing life, whether destroying it or attempting to create it.

The Cook

He is the only good-natured character in the film. In his position as the head chef of the restaurant, he in essence becomes the screenwriter (or the narrative catalyst) of a film about consumption; consumption, and the disastrous effects upon the consumer. Towards the end of the film, when he agrees to prepare the final meal, he writes the conclusion of the story. All the previous acts of consumption have now been taken to their absurd extreme. When all of the meals in the restaurant have been prepared, all of the food resources exhausted, all of the dishes served, we are left with only those who reside at the top of the food chain: ourselves – tearing away at each other like the frenzied dogs in the beginning of the picture. What a harrowing depiction of what can happen when we let our hunger consume us!

The Thief

It is a rare occasion when a character this barbarous and extreme terrorizes the screen with his presence. The thief is excruciatingly perverse – a man who gains pleasure by destroying those by the means of the very devices that they love the most. The thief and the cook inhabit roles that are somewhat intertwined. Where the cook prepares the meals, the thief forces them down your throat. The cook makes his living by transforming death into a desirable art; the thief only makes a living by hastening a messy conclusion to life. In a sense, one creates and the other destroys – even though the result of both characters’ actions is similar. When the thief forces the pages of a book down the lover’s throat, he twists the act of readerly consumption in order to serve his own diabolical needs. It is only fair that he perishes in the end while being forced to consume in the same way he has forced others, with all of the people he has wronged standing witness to his forced attrition.

His Wife

It would seem that she redeems herself and her lover by killing her husband. On the contrary, she is only continuing the cycle of over-consumption and death. By having an affair (a justified one), she allows her passions to consume her. The locales for her illicit lovemaking lead her in a sort of cycle that inversely mirrors the process of consumption. Originating in the bathroom (where what we have consumed leaves us as waste), she and her lover eventually end up in the freezer (where food is held, awaiting preparation). When she attempts to break this cycle by fleeing to a library (one of the last places where her husband would be found) with her lover, it proves to be a false asylum. Here she has transgressed the boundaries of the food chain and must return to the fold. This fall from (or at least search for) grace is what makes for the bleak ending of the film.

Her Lover

Early in the film the lover is associated with the written word. He barely touches his meal when in the restaurant and is frequently engrossed in his books (replacing one form of consumption with another – intellectual knowledge versus carnal). His ignorance of the food chain means that he must serve to further it. In a narrative and literal sense the lover becomes a meal himself.

This film is one that displays a sort of anti-narrative. It approaches an experimental stream-of-consciousness that masquerades as an orderly and classical text. The film moves in a circular pattern. It not only chases its own tail but hungrily bites at it as well. By the end of the film we are right back where we started. Everyone in the film is touched by the laws of consumption at some point. The most disturbing insight of this film is the self-realization of our role as the dominant species participating in the food chain. As such, we can only look at ourselves when there is nothing left to consume.

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