The Cook The Thief His Wife Her Lover

(Continued from the previous post.)

The second film I was rather surprised to stumble upon on youtube was the Peter Greenaway classic The Cook The Thief His Wife Her Lover (1989), which apart from anything else has got to be one of the best titles in cinema.

I feel there are few "perfect" works of art. I don't mean that as a value jugement, but in the sense that great masterpieces can also be vulgar or lopsided or or unfinished or idiosyncratic or chaotic or unequal somehow; and that quite inferior or anyways second-rate art can sometimes achieve a pleasing balance, a perfectly poised equilibrium. Neither would be "perfect". But once in a while both qualities of great harmony and raw invention come together seamlessly. For example, Proust's towering masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, is not "perfect" in this sense: the initial, cathedral-like architecture for the novel having gradually been obscured, torn apart, exploded by the writer's continual subsequent additions to it, obsessively larding the text with myriad qualifications and clarifications and repetitions. The result of this is no doubt greater than the original project, but it  has been robbed of its formal "perfection" — and this perhaps, is one of the things that make it essentially modern. Compare it with Henry James's masterpiece The Ambassadors, another story of awakening, which is "perfect" — and is in fact perhaps one of the most miraculous balancing acts in literature. Both are great books but one is at some level chaotic and the other perfectly controlled.

All of this to say that I think the Greenaway film is one of these rare beasts, the perfect work of art. It presents the strange integration of a Brechtian theatrical/musical/didactic morality tale with the baroque exuberance and intimations of mortality of early modern English music and Flemish painting (as reappropriated by Micheal Nyman's brilliant Purcellesque musical commentary and with inspired 80's flash by Jean-Paul Gaultier's costumes). The action takes place in a Restaurant, which is just a stage, a beautiful and elaborate box to contain the characters and justify their interactions. What happens is that the Worst Man In The World (the Thief, played by Michael Gambon) makes a fancy French restaurant his headquarters. He is a truly vile character: his vulgarity knows no bounds, nor does his predatory violence or hectoring viciousness. Surrounded by his crew of feral, brutish thugs, he gorges himself on the refined food prepared by the Cook (played by Richard Bohringer), a great artist and an upright man, but one initially resigned to the undesirable patronage of the Thief. Now the Thief has a Wife (Helen Mirren); she is a delicate person, despite being the habitual victim of the Thief's contempt and sadistic urges. She has somehow, in spite of everything, retained her elegance and dignity. Repulsed by the usual shenanigans of her husband and his associates, she notices a distinguished gentleman in the restaurant, who likes to eat alone and read books (Her Lover, played by Alan Howard). First they flirt silently across the room but soon enough, they embark on a passionate love affair in the ladies room and subsequently in a section of the kitchen that the Cook has reserved for them in a kind of tacit pact for the sake of love and against death, personified by the dread Thief. Of course, at length, the affair is discovered and though the lovers manage to escape together, the Thief is able to follow their trail and exact a terrible vengeance from his rival — slowly suffocating him with the pages of the books he so liked to read. Somehow a line has been crossed; summoning her courage, the Wife arranges for the Cook to cook her lover's corpse, so that she can feed it to the Thief as part of her own, and perhaps the whole world's, cathartic revenge on the Thief. With the complicity of the Cook and the whole restaurant staff, she traps hims and, at gunpoint, having neutralized his gang of thugs, she forces him, now powerless and looking like a terrified boy, to eat the flesh of her murdered lover, before shooting him, and uttering his final condemnation: "Cannibal!"...

 What great stuff!