The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover | Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover | Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon | Grotesque but also gorgeous - and wait for a better DVD

vhs video:

The Cook, the Thie...

	The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon Vidmark, 1994 average customer review:based on 112 reviews
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Brutal, Grotesque and Great

This is a movie many people either love or hate; and I like it a lot. It's all style, all color, all rage. A thief (Michael Gambon as Albert Spica) and his wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren) with his toadies and gang members dine each night at the restaurant of the cook (Richard Bohringer). Spica is a monster; crude, loud and a bully with the table manners of a hog. The first scene in the movie is Spica, his gang and their women getting out of their cars in a dark, wet alleyway and preparing to enter the restaurant through the kitchen. But first they deal with a guy who owes Spica money. His gang brings Spica dog excrement on pieces of paper; Spica wipes the stuff all over the other guy's face and mouth. They strip him down while the women watch and Spica continues to smear him. He pokes at the cowering man on the ground with his cane, while others kick at him. Then he urinates on him...but chews out a toadie who was going to do the same because the toadie might offend the women. Spica's behavior doesn't get any better. Georgina Spica wears matyrdom like a cloak. Eating every night in the restaurant is a shy, book-loving man (Alan Howard) who ignores the uproar Albert and his gang create. He and Georgina see each other and he becomes her lover, making love everywhere in the restaurant that they can find where it's quiet, with the help of the cook. The thief finds out and deals with the lover. The wife takes her revenge with the complicity of the cook in a grotesque and appropriate way.

Sounds simple enough, but this movie is a powerhouse. The look of the film, like so much of Greenaway's stuff, is lush and highly stylized. The rooms of the restaurant have their own colors and the costumes of the actors change colors as they move from room to room. The kitchen is huge and strange, with boiling kettles, hanging instruments and tables piled high with glassware and dishes; with geese being plucked in clouds of feathers; with fat, half-naked men stirring steaming sauce pans. A white-haired, retarded boy does simple tasks while singing in a counter-tenor.

The movie, I think, seems to be about anger and retribution. Gambon is a powerful as Albert Spica, completely repellant, domineering and absolutely fascinating. Helen Mirren is superb, and one of the bravest actors around. Her humiliation at the hands of her husband just goes on and on. Her scenes of sexual escape with Alan Howard are hardly erotic, but they are explicit and strong.

Greenaway has done a number of films. I think a lot of Prospero's Books (1991) and The Draughtsman's Contract (1982). He's a guy you have to get in the mood for, though. He doesn't make easy films.

for more information click here

Grotesque but also gorgeous - and wait for a better DVD

If you have not seen this movie already, think twice before buying this DVD. Instead, wait for a showing at a good art theater, or wait for a better DVD version. Greenaway's movie affects viewers by contrasting beauty and horror, but for the effect to work, the images must be crisp and perfectly rendered. This DVD does not preserve movie quality resolution and so the effect is lost. Apart from that, the movie itself is the most memorable I have ever seen. I first saw it in 1990 and remembered almost all of it before viewing it a second time last night.

The production is flawless. Each cast member is matched perfectly to each part: a wry, clever, wise Cook (Bohringer), a violent, unpleasant, loud Thief (Gambon), a suffering quiet Wife (Mirren) and a discrete Lover (Howard). Look also for a young Tim Roth playing his usual delinquent role. The photography is carefully planned, right down to the red water melons with green rinds split open on the cutting table. All the kitchen shots look like masterful 19th century still life paintings. There are interesting visual tricks: the costumes change color as the characters move from the dining room (red) to the kitchen (green).

But be warned, this is not a pleasant movie. The film begins and ends with two unmentionable scenes. The thief insults his wife throughout the movie and it's soon difficult not to cringe at the sight of him. There is spitting and graphic vomiting. Make sure you've eaten some time before seeing this. And don't plan a dinner aftewards; you'll be too dizzy.

for more information click here

Twisted!

I saw this movie in the theater when it was first released in the US. Talk about serendipity - my father had just passed away and my sister, neice, her husband, nephew, and I were looking for something to do the night before the memorial. Since this was showing, and my niece and her husband are in the movie business (she is an actor, he is a director and screen writer), we all went to see it together. All I can say is, none of us will ever forget that night!

That said, this movie isn't for everyone, but it is brilliantly scripted, filmed, and edited. Definitely one for the archives.

for more information click here

You have to be in the mood.

Should you care to be hypnotized and weirded out at the same time, try this genre-hopper. It's a comedy, but it's also gross. It's a thinker, but at some moments, it's also a stinker. Watch this on a rainy afternoon with your favorite sarcastic friend.

Cook Thief Wife Lover

The Cook, as becomes his station, is above it all.
The Thief is a glutton, and a wicked, wicked man.
The Wife is beautiful, bored and abused.
Her Lover likes to read while he eats.

Everything in THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER is larger than life. Sets are huge, colors are garish, the loud bad guy is very loud, and very bad, indeed. Although Michael Gambon gives an appropriately broad reading to his villainous character, the mordant humor of it all creates an irredeemable flaw. Some people will respond to his evil shenanigans with disgust rather than amusement. Still others will find it jarring when the volume is lowered.
Helen Mirren delivers an emotional monologue near the end of the picture that I found curiously unmoving. If felt like a quiet, human moment plopped down in the middle of a broad farce, and the abrupt change of tone created an emotional chasm that I couldn't cross.
CTWL won't appeal to everybody. If you don't connect with its dark, situational humor, its brutality may be a little too much to bear.

for more information click here