The Wafer-Thin Mint (A review of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover)

You will never see such a beautiful film about the ugliness of the world as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Peter Greenaway has long been dissatisfied with cinema being strictly a storytelling medium, and here has constructed the first attempt to capture the horror of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Remember those school trips to the Tate Modern, or the National Portrait Gallery? There was at least one watercolour, or sculpture, or statue, or piece of modern art that caught your attention because of how disturbing it was, the kind you couldn't take your eyes off of.

That's this film in a nutshell.

For a director so disdainful of storytelling, Greenaway gives The Cook... possibly his most conventional narrative to date. Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) is a rich gangster who has bullied his way into being co-owner of a lavish French restaurant aimed at the societal elite. Spica operates a protection racket: "protection against the rash temper of my men, against the sudden arrival of food poisoning, rats and the public health inspector" entitles him and his gang of sniggering sycophants to a private table every night and their every whim indulged by the head chef Richard (Richard Bohringer). His wife Georgina (Helen Mirren), growing tired of the emotional, physical and sexual abuse Spica regularly dishes out, starts an affair with Michael (Alan Howard), a shy retiring man who owns a bookshop.

And then everything goes to shit.

The Cook... owes a lot to Brechtian-style epic theatre, in that Greenaway proudly displays the artificiality of the piece. The characters' costumes change colour depending on what room they're in - red in the dining hall, green in the kitchen, white in the toilets, blue in the car park. The restaurant itself has an exterior that looks exactly like a giant soundstage, with the scaffolding holding the sets up clearly visible. The boy soprano featured on the bombastic elegant score by post-minimalist composer Michael Nyman is a minor character. This extends to the characters- well, I say "characters", but that doesn't really apply since they're all skin-deep. The Cook is Richard, the Thief is Spica, Georgina is his Wife, and Michael her Lover. There. You now know everything you need to know about them, bar one personality trait. These parts are all well-acted, particularly Gambon as Spica, who is completely despicable, cruel and hateful. He'd almost be a pantomime villain if he wasn't so goddamn frightening.

The production values are gorgeous. Experimental fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier turns his hand towards the costumes to grand effect. Spica's gang wear full-body sashes, sweeping black jackets, tight trousers tucked into boots and frilled, lace-lined cuffs, making them look like Elizabethan mods. Georgina dons a spider-web style dress so gigantic, several members of the serving staff have to carry the train where she walks. The sets are lushly decorated and full of detail, most notably the use of colour. The dining hall is crimson, evoking blood and primal emotion: anger, lust, wrath. The kitchen is dark green and full of steam, like a jungle or a rainforest. None of these are particularly subtle, but then The Cook... isn't keen to indulge in subtlety in order to make his point.

These beautiful designs are put in stark contrast to some truly disturbing images and deeds committed. Any film that opens with a close-up of a pack of dogs eating bloody meat and follows it with a man being force-fed the resulting excrement is not one you can sit down to watch while eating a takeaway, and it just gets nastier from there: Michael and Georgina are forced to hide in a van full of rotting meat. A dog is run over and its mangled corpse is shown in graphic close-up. A kid gets buttons forced down his throat and vomits himself into a coma. A man is killed by having his favourite book forced down his throat with a wooden spoon. Consumption is a recurring theme in this film, and so it ends in the only way it really can: cannibalism! 

The Cook... is a political satire, just like every single piece of fiction made during the Thatcher years. Spica and his gang represent a new breed that came about as the result of Britain's change to a free market economy: a bunch of witless moneyed thugs who believed that having money meant they could ignore all previous notions of values and morality, and bullied those who opposed them - Spica claims to have "a heart of gold, and a great deal of money to match". He comes across almost as a grotesquely magnified version of the sort of people who read the Daily Mail - he considers himself a connoisseur and Renaissance man, berating Georgina for smoking in the most vulgar terms, lecturing his men on the right way to eat Parisian cuisine and how to dress, believes belching loudly is proper dining etiquette, and brays about such illuminating beliefs that "Ethiopians enjoy starving - keeps them thin and graceful". Spica considers himself an artist for combining business and pleasure, when he's little more than a strategically-shaved gorilla someone put in a nice suit.

Ultimately, I don't know what to make of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. The combination of high culture and scatology won't be to everyone's taste, and Spica's gleeful cruelty veers a little too close to Greenaway's own. This is a film mired in nihilism, where horrible rich men rule over the gifted and poor, where every brief moment of passion and love is hinged with the threat of discovery and ultimately doomed. Every ounce of joy and charity is immediately crushed underfoot like the fag-end of a cigarette. It's a black comedy, beautifully designed and very well-acted, about how fucked the world is. Should you watch it?

Well, that depends on your taste.