The cook, the thief, his wife and their lover

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Movie
German title The cook, the thief, his wife and their lover
Original title The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
Country of production France , Netherlands , Great Britain
original language English
Publishing year 1989
length 119 minutes
Age rating FSK 18
Rod
Director Peter Greenaway
script Peter Greenaway
production Kees Kasander
music Michael Nyman
camera Sacha Vierny
cut John Wilson
occupation

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is a 1989 film directed and directed by Peter Greenaway , starring Richard Bohringer , Michael Gambon , Helen Mirren and Alan Howard in the title roles. The film is a black comedy and contains the representation of cannibalism and naked genitals. Jean-Paul Gaultier designed the costumes, Michael Nyman wrote the music and Giorgio Locatelli, an English TV chef, prepared the dishes.

action

Albert Spica is a well-off, violent gangster and co-owner of the French restaurant "Le Hollandais", where he and his gang eat and drink every evening. Although Spica claims to be a gourmet, the truth is that he has no sense of good food. His taste is coarse, he himself is violent and insulting towards the other guests as well as the servants. Spica's wife Georgina is regularly abused by him and is appalled by him. But she cannot part with him because she fears his brutality. However, she meets another regular at the restaurant, the intellectual Michael. With the permission of the chef Richard, they use the Le Hollandais kitchen for their sexual encounters.

When Albert learns of the affair, he vows to kill Michael, then cook and eat. Michael and Georgina flee to Michael's book store where he lives, but Albert finds the hiding place through an address in a book. While Georgina visits a kitchen boy in hospital who has been tortured and seriously injured by Albert, Albert orders that Michael be killed by stuffing him with the pages of his books. Georgina later finds Michael's body.

Georgina returns to the restaurant and asks the chef Richard to cook Michael's body. At first he refuses because he thinks Georgina wants to eat her dead lover. However, when she explains that she intends to force Albert to eat the body, he agrees. Georgina, armed and surrounded by other Albert victims, presents Michael's fried and prepared body. At gunpoint she suggests to Albert: "Try the tail" (in the English original "cock"). Albert refuses, but his resistance fades and he takes a bite of Michael's meat. Georgina then shoots him and calls him "cannibal".

Cinematic means

For the most part, the film takes place in or in front of the restaurant, making it look like a chamber play . Long tracking shots within the expansive rooms and from one room to the next support the impression. Finally, a curtain falls before the credits begin. The rooms of the restaurant are dominated by different colors - the kitchen green, the restaurant red and the toilet white - the scenes outside on the street in blue. The clothes of many actors change their color when moving from one room to the next, most noticeably with Georgina, who wears a red dress in the restaurant but a white one in the toilet and a green one in the kitchen. With Albert and others, only individual parts such as shirt, tie or sash often change color. Michael's clothing color does not change when the room changes, on the contrary, his presence in the toilet is underlined by a slight coloring of the light. Changing music also corresponds to the rooms shown. Other locations in the film are only the hospital and Michael's bookstore, which is assigned the color brown.

Linguistically, Albert's monologues dominate, especially at the beginning, in which he reveals his world views, while the (sexual) relationship between Michael and Georgina takes place without words. This is addressed in the film itself when Michael says that he once saw a film in which the main actor did not speak a word for the first half hour; when he did, he lost interest after five minutes.

interpretation

The film was made at a time when Margaret Thatcher's tenure as British Prime Minister was drawing to a close as the power of the old class-based elites in government and business eroded in favor of people who were financially successful. Steinberg sees the film as a settlement ... with the Thatcherism of his time [as] a form of capitalism that Greenaway equates with criminality .

criticism

“Manneristically stretched, idiosyncratic aesthetic revenge tragedy based on models of the Jacobean drama, which in physical directness draws on stylized, but nevertheless blatant shock elements. A hermetic, gruesome image of a destructive, self-centered and senseless cosmos. "

- Lexicon of international film

Versions

The original length of the film was 124 minutes. It was first X-rated , later rated NC-17 . Two versions of the film were released on VHS in the 1990s: a cut, 95-minute version rated as R-restricted , and the original version.

reception

  • The film title was taken up in a modified form many times.
  • One episode of The Simpsons is called "The Mook, the Chef, the Wife and Her Homer".
  • In the computer game The Curse of Monkey Island a chapter is called "the bartender, the thieves, his aunt and her lover".
  • The video game Grand Theft Auto III contains a series of four assignments whose names are based on the title of the film: "The Crook", "The Thieves", "The Wife" and "Her Lover". The contracts are for Marty Chonks, a dog food factory owner who lures his victims into his factory to make dog food out of them.
  • The anarchist pop band Chumbawamba released the title “Georgina” on their album “Anarchy” in 1994, which refers to the film.

literature

  • Peter Greenaway: the cook, the thief, his wife and her lover. Script. Translation by Michel Bodmer. Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1989
  • Andreas Kilb: The infernal Last Supper in: Die Zeit, No. 48, November 24, 1989
  • Georg Seeßlen: The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover in: Konkret. 01/90, p. 90. [2]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tomas Steinberg 2004. [1]
  2. ↑ The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used