The Controversial 1989 Shocker The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover Gives New Meaning to the Phrase "Eat a dick"
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When I was thirteen years old in 1989, the two most essential things in my life were movies and boobs. Those were not my only interests, of course. I also liked television, sports, politics, comic strips, and newspapers, but I was positively obsessed with cinema and naked mammaries. I enjoyed the art of film in no small part because it was a way of seeing naked mammaries of tremendous quality and quantity.
Peter Greenaway’s 1989 breakthrough film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover consequently spoke to my interests.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover’s violence, sexuality, and light cannibalism indirectly helped lead to the creation of the NC-17 rating the following year. 1990’s Henry and June was the first film to receive this new rating, which was like an X rating, but with class.
Nudity involving porn stars with names like Chesty McBigJuggs got slapped with an X rating. Nudity involving Academy Award-winning screen legend Dame Helen Mirren was more likely to receive an NC-17.
Movies like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover put the ratings board in a dilly of a pickle. In its original 124-minute form, the provocative shocker had too much sex and graphic violence to qualify for an R rating. Yet it seemed wrong to give it an X rating because it is so transparently art rather than pornography.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover is quintessential arthouse fare. It seemingly belongs in a gallery as much as a movie theater.
When I worked as a video store clerk in the early 1990s, the R-rated, 94-minute version of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was a popular favorite due less to its artistry than the eternal appeal of Helen Mirren’s naked breasts.
I try to be respectful and not objectify women, but sometimes I’ll see a movie for work that turns me back into a 13 year old whose life was an endless quest to look at boobs all over again. The Dennis Hopper scorcher The Hot Spot was one such film. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is another.
In The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover, Mirren plays Georgina, the gorgeous trophy wife of Albert Spica, a vicious mobster played by Michael Gambon with feral intensity.
Albert is a brute of a man, a vulgar savage who defiles the Le Hollandais, the elegant and expensive restaurant that he owns, every time that he enters its doors with his crude criminal cohorts.
Albert never stops talking. He’s a motormouth monster who dominates every conversation with his belligerence, aggression, and temper.
The archvillain’s long-suffering wife understands that the best way to avoid being the target of one of her husband’s furious rages is to say as little as possible. Georgina is mute for much of the film’s first act. She’s a prisoner of marriage, a deeply unhappy wife desperate to break away from the barbarian she married.
Georgina enters into a torrid affair with Michael (Alan Howard), an unassuming bookstore owner who catches her eye while reading at Le Hollandais. Georgina and Michael make passionate love in the restaurant’s bathroom.
Albert is too stupid and oblivious to realize his wife is cheating on him with a man in his own business.
The titular lover is everything that Michael is not. He’s gentle, cultured, well-read, a skilled lover, and tender, whereas Albert has all the grace and subtlety of a crowbar to the cranium.
Michael and Georgina’s sexual tryst begins silently. The lovers don’t even learn each other’s names until a half hour in. Mirren’s face betrays the awful psychological cost of living with a violent brute.
Georgina’s fling with a cerebral bookstore owner opens a window to a world where she has agency and power and can pursue her carnal desires instead of being the breathtaking arm candy of someone she despises.
Everyone despises Albert. It’s hard not to! Despite being a philistine, he appreciates the artistry and sophistication of Richard Boarst (Richard Bohringer), the French chef at Le Hollandais, but he is incapable of treating anyone with respect.
It’s the titular Cook!
The Cook, his wife, and her lover share an enemy in Albert. The chef helps hide the lovers from his boss, the bane of his existence.
The thief is so dense that he never realizes that his wife might be heading to the bathroom for extended periods for reasons other than an overactive bladder. He never wises up.
Albert, incidentally, was named for Albert Finney, the actor Greenaway wanted for the role. The crook learns from an associate that his wife is having an affair with the meek bookworm customer and is predictably apoplectic.
It takes almost nothing to send Albert into a murderous rage. That’s his default emotional state. Learning that a woman he considers his property is stepping out on him with a tweedy gentleman makes Albert explode.
He vows to kill Michael and eat him. In a Monkey’s Paw scenario, Albert gets his wish in the darkest way.
The film's tone shifts dramatically when Albert learns of his wife’s affair. What was a cold, cerebral, even academic exploration of loneliness, betrayal, violence, power, and brute force becomes unexpectedly poignant and humane.
Arctic chilliness gives way to warmth when Georgina leaves Albert to pursue a life with her lover.
There are spoilers ahead, so if you don’t want the ending of a thirty-six-year-old movie ruined, stop reading now.
Albert and his men, most notably a young Tim Roth, find Michael, make him eat the pages of his favorite book, and kill him.
This happens reasonably deep into the third act, but Richard remains onscreen despite being dead, to such an extent that it would be easy to mistake this for a Weekend at Bernie’s sequel.
Losing her lover breaks Georgina. She goes mad with anger, despair, and loneliness.
She asks Richard to cook Michael for her, an odd request. Richard initially declines for understandable reasons but reluctantly acquiesces.
This is where things get dark. A gun-toting Georgina, accompanied by many of the little people that Albert has terrorized and abused, forces a mortified Albert to eat Michael’s penis. She doesn’t just tell him to eat a dick; she forces him to feast upon the very appendage that brought his long-suffering wife so much joy.
It’s the revenge of the repressed, as the people Albert has tormented finally experience the ecstasy of revenge.
Now would probably be a good point to mention that the plot of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is not particularly important.
The screenplay is less important than the cinematography, production design, costume design, direction, and music. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is a feast for the senses. It’s the least naturalistic and most stylized film imaginable.
Greenaway never aspires to realism. Greenaway’s arthouse hit was filmed on sets as impressive as they are unlikely. The restaurant set is roughly the size of a small city or at least a football stadium. Greenaway fills the screen with bold colors, primarily blue and red, and surreal, intricate details that are impossible to fully grasp with only a single viewing.
The arthouse auteur favors lengthy tracking shots that immerse us into a starkly stylized world of sensuality and brutality, great beauty, and almost inconceivable ugliness. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is a magnificent mood piece that begins chilly and gets progressively warmer until it’s white hot.
It’s an unlikely but poignant love story about two people who cannot escape the brutality of the world around them.
It took me a very long time to get around to experiencing one of the most controversial movies of the late 1980s. I’m glad I did because The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Love has much more to offer than luscious naked breasts, bu, you know,t it has those as well, if you’re into that kind of thing.
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