The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. - movie reviews

National Review, May 14, 1990 by John Simon

Still, The Handmaid's Tale is only inept and annoying; for true horror, I commend to you Peter Greenaway's latest, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, a film whose detestableness is heralded by its ponderous title. Have you noticed, by the way, the depredations of the ampersand on film titling? It is a dependable harbinger of disaster, as recently in Stanley & Iris, and now in what I'll shorten to CTW&L. Why those ampersands? It wasn't Romeo & Juliet or Crime & Punishment. But, beloved of law firms and typographers, the ampersand has become chic & is here to stay.

But back to Peter Greenaway, a British painter, novelist, and film-maker. His first full-length effort, The Draftsman's Contract (1982), was so pretentious, hollow, and odious that it set my teeth on edge; I had the urge to throw something equally rotten back at the screen. It was an attempt at a bawdy, witty, nasty Restoration comedy bolstered with the savagery of Jacobean revenge tragedy. But the comedy was not witty enough, the tragedy was gratuitously grafted on, and the whole thing made no sense. What could be more flavorous than an olla podrida of smuttiness, obscurantism, and self-congratulation?

As a result, I stayed away from Greenaway's next offerings: A Zed and Two Naughts, The Belly of an Architect, Drowning by Numbers, whose very titles inspired difference. But the glowing hullabaloo that greeted CTW&L demanded investigation. In the New York Times, where the two senior critics prudently abstained and let young #3, Caryn James, pluck this chestnut out of the fire, we could read that this "profound" film was, among other things, "a work so intelligent and powerful that it evokes our best emotions and least civil impulses." Where, I wondered, did this evocation take place: on the screen or in the auditorium? On film, it takes very little profoundity to display noble feelings and bestial impulses. To evoke them in the audience--rather more interesting--would presumably mean causing you to make impassioned love to your neighbor on the left while urinating on the person sitting to your right.

It is with the latter that the film begins. In a garishly lit parking lot, the Thief (Michael Gambon), actually a major gangster, and his henchmen torture an unidentified man: they strip him, smear excrement on him, pee on him, and might go further if the Wife, impassively smoking in the car, did not advise the Thief to desist. Albert Spica, the Thief, then vents his fury on Georgina, the Wife, as they enter his fancy restaurant. In the parking lot, savage curs roam about, getting in the pigs' heads and maggot-infested fish that fill garbage trucks seemingly uneager to cart them away.

One enters the restaurant, Le Hollandais, so named after a huge replica of Frans Hals's Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Militia that hangs on one of its walls, through the kitchen. This kitchen has a staff ranging from half-naked potbellied food handlers to a kitchen boy with punk yellow hair and an epicene persona, constantly singing hymns in a shrill voice. The saturnine Cook is played by Richard Bohringer, a posturing French actor with an impenetrable accent in English. Bohringer starred in Diva, Jean-Jacques Beineix's obnoxious and nonsensical film, a manifest influence on CTW&L, and the luridly green kitchen is his Plutonian domain.

From this we pass to the crimson dining room, where the Thief and his men, dolled up in quasi-Halsian regalia clashing with their oafish talk and foul behavior, seem to be regulars--after all, the Thief owns the place. The Wife, in this swinishly illogical film, is especially illogical: for years she has tolerated the Thief's shoving, or making her shove, bottles, wooden spoons, etc. up her crotch by way of sex, and his beatings, buffetings, and cruel beratings by way of connubial bliss. Four times she has escaped, and allowed herself to be found and taken back. True, this is not realistic film-making, but some sort of stylized explanation, if I may put it so, wouldn't hurt.

The Thief, Albert Spica (is he so named that people addressing him should seem to be saying "Mr. Speaker," creating instant parliamentary satire?), roughs up everyone: henchmen, kitchen staff, waitresses, customers. He pulls off tablecloths with full dishes on them, pummels the diners, sometimes emptying a soup tureen on their heads before, literally, kicking them out. Just for fun, mind you, or to vent his anger at Georgina on them. The way the clientele on and off screen puts up with this suggests that Greenway's view of people as sadomasochists may be justified.

Meanwhile, the Wife is making goo-goo eyes at a rather seedy youngish man in a rust-brown suit, who dines regularly at the restaurant in the company of two or three hefty tomes (some of them old and rare-looking), one of which he reads as he eats. The Thief likes to come up and toss some of these books on the floor, whereat the reader, who doesn't speak till midway into the film, smiles. Does the Thief do this because he realizes that Georgina's ever more frequent visits to the ladies' room allow her to make love in one of the stalls to Michael, as the bookish fellow is called? Not a bit; Albert is too thick to catch on to the obvious--maybe because the Cook's weird specialties are only too likely to induce diarrhea.