The final scene of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover involves an ultimate comeuppance – a display of such savagery that it must, more than anything else in this work of excoriating satire, have accounted for the film’s unrated release in the United States. Trapped within a prudish, largely conservative cinema system, the film’s American distributor (Miramax, then independently owned by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein) were given two choices by the Motion Picture Association. They could accept an X rating – which in any case would be forced out of style the following year – and run the risk of marketing the film as something close to pornography. Or they could release the film unrated so as not to bury it in bad publicity.
It’s important to start with these notes about the film’s stateside release struggles, because something more sinister lurks at the center of that part of the film’s story. The target of the film’s satire might as well be the Thatcher era that was about to end. The British Conservative leader resigned her office within a year after this film’s release in her country and just months after its American debut, and of course, her premiership ran concurrently with Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the United States. The film, written and directed by Greenaway, feels like an exorcism of the politics that drove those reigns in office, with Thatcher’s poll tax and Reagan’s allergy to government spending pilfering from whatever remained of the lower-middle classes and enabling the rich to guide “family values.”
This film didn’t really earn its ratings controversy because of its content, then, but rather because of its refusal to accept political realities. That still doesn’t entirely grapple with the brutal and brutally funny final moments of the movie, though, in which Albert (“the thief,” although he is not simply that) is forced by Georgina (“his wife”) to eat the corpse of Michael (“her lover”), boiled and carved and loving prepared by Boarst (“the cook”). One can feel the eventual influence of this film upon such works as Todd Solondz’s Happiness (which similarly follows a handful of characters through a grotesquerie of sorts) and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things (particularly in the design elements, which construct an artificial world of, well, grotesqueries), and see its own influence, such as how the satire of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is hidden beneath a deluge of violence and sex.
There is a lot of violence and sex, here, too. The film takes place over the course of no more than a few days within the “normal” operations of a restaurant owned by Albert (Michael Gambon), an ultra-toxic, mega-alpha man-child. He’s a horrifying tyrant, operating without mercy or scruples, at one point torturing his own underage employee Pup (Paul Russell) for information. One can imagine (but doesn’t need to do that, since we see it) what might happen when he discovers Georgina’s (Helen Mirren) affair with the mild bookshop owner Michael (Alan Howard). It’s yet another violent act of abject cruelty, incorporating a bad joke about Michael’s chosen profession (and, if we want to get all fabulist about it, anti-literature in nature).
As for the sex, well, there’s a lot of that, too – enough, indeed, to account for the film’s eventual NC-17 re-rating (after the official institution of it as a silent replacement of the X during the very month of this film’s release). For Michael, it’s pure passion, of course, but for Georgina, locked into a relationship whose physical side is almost assuredly not consensual at all (if there is anything we learn about Albert’s ethos, it’s that a person exists to be in an automatic state of approval when in his presence), it’s an escape more than a mere affair. If we are to extend the film’s political satire to these stretches, one could say that Georgina’s desire to shun the tightened conformity of her husband’s tyranny is akin to rebuffing the contemporary political atmosphere. That would be the easiest read, of course.
In a broader sense, though, the film is an act of rebellion against the ideas of storytelling conformity, too. The setting is entirely and exclusively a restaurant – its red-adorned main hall, its opulently white bathrooms, its cluttered but spotless kitchens, its nestled hideaways, and its grungy alleyway, often stained by blood. The production was designed by Greenaway regulars Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs (the latter of whom has since shifted into the world of the big-budget blockbuster, which one can intuit from the grandiloquence here), and the director of photography was the bona-fide legend Sacha Vierny (Alain Resnais’ cinematographer of choice on the masterpieces Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour). The film’s aesthetic is more than just style – although it is exceedingly stylish – and more like a constant, suffocating presence laid over its decadence.
Eventually, the movie shifts into the urgency of its final act, in which a fed-up Georgina plots revenge against Albert’s brutality and Michael’s galvanizing murder by employing Boarst (Richard Bohringer) to whip up that final gag of a meal. It’s not even just that she plots to force-feed Michael’s corpse to Albert, by the way, but also the punch line of which appendage she chooses for the first bite (a surprise that will be kept from readers of even this retrospective piece). The movie admittedly does hammer home its political fable by this point, but that’s what’s so satisfying about the whole, lurid thing. Georgina’s final word and action are so loaded that we can neither deny nor ignore the point.
The four performances are all magnetic in different and evolving ways – except for Gambon’s scenery-devouring despot, of course, whose manner never changes, but he wouldn’t be a tyrant if he did. The supporting cast is deep, with early roles for Tim Roth and Ciarán Hinds as a pair of Albert’s lackeys, Roger Ashton-Griffiths as his bookkeeper, Roger Lloyd-Pack as a gangster, and still others. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover offers genuine shocks and nasty surprises, but the most surprising thing of all is its political heft. It is unafraid of the turmoil of its own existence, dropping us into a hellscape of its own (and our) design.
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