Matt Dutton
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Directed by Peter Greenaway
British-French romantic crime drama
Released Nov. 1, 1989 (France); April 6, 1990
(US)
Distributed by Palace Pictures (UK); Miramax
Films (US)
Box Office: $7,724,701
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Criticized for its graphic scatological (gruesome
display of excrement, violence and nude scenes
Praised for its lavish cinematography and
formalism by contemporary reviewers
124 minute cut originally intended to be rated X
Cut down to 94 minutes for R-rated theatrical
release
Despite controversies, film has received generally
positive reviews from critics
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Political: Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Thatcherism
Sadism: Excrement, Cannibalism; Rot
Aesthetics: Colors, Costumes, Still Paintings
Biblical: New Testament: Psalm 51 and The Last
Supper
Social Problems: Greed, Conflict between
Creativity and Consumption, Consumerism
Not adapted from any single play
Greenaway claims to have modeled film after
classic revenge tragedies of the English Jacobean
Theatre
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Leonard Quart reviewed film in 1990 for the
magazine Cineaste
Identified film as a political satire meant to rebel
against the policies of Margaret Thatcher
(Thatcherism)
Greenaway structures characters to help portray his
message
Albert is meant to represent the negatives of
Thatcherism and Capitalist society
Reason why Albert is given the most lines and is a
disgusting, vile man
Quart claims that ultimately Greenaway created a
film that is more style than substance and is empty at
its core; fails to accurately depict political message
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“What accounts for the
success of The Cook…is that,
on its surface, the film is a
shocking work. It contains a
great many sensational
elements, opening with a with
a man being smeared with shit
and urinated on by a gang of
thugs and moving on to
explicit sex and nudity,
sadistic beatings and
mutilation, murder, and
finally, gourmet
cannibalism…Greenaway’s
cool, detached style
estheticized most of the film’s
violence and titillated and
excited rather than alienated a
large portion of its audience.”
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Of course, since Greenaway’s film
is a fable with political
implications, it need not provide
detailed motivation for its
characters. But viewed as a
political parable, and Greenaway
states that The Cook…is suffused
with his ‘anger and passion about
the terrifying pejoratives done to
the political life in Great Britain by
this wretched Mrs. Thatcher…The
Cook…clearly means to have
political and social implications,
but its real distinction lies in its
form… Greenaway may think that
‘art should take on the issues,’
confront and outrage people. His
work, however, never gets beyond
its coolly exhilarating surfaces to
truly disturb a viewer’s moral
vision.”
-Leonard Quart
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“Michael Walsh
characterizes the film’s
political critique as an
ideologically fashionable
liberal reaction to the
excesses of the 1980’s,
unsupported by a historical
understanding of British
politics. ‘The proletarian
monster central to The Cook
suggests that this film has
joined in Thatcher’s
vengeance on the imagined
values of the lower social
order.”
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Ruth D. Johnston “The
Staging of the Bourgeois
Imaginary in The Cook…”
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“The problem with such
analyses is that in their
attempts to relate the film to
British politics, Quart and
Walsh, among others, fail to
realize that its formal
concerns and social criticism
are inextricable. ..Because of
his political affinities with
international modernism,
Greenaway does not engage
in a head-on confrontation
with Thatcherism as a
‘political filmmaker’; rather,
his political critique
proceeds from a ‘less explicit
artistic position”
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Johnston
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“The artifice that most potently evokes the full
dimensions of the economic recession affecting
Britain under Thatcher is probably the uncanny,
eerie atmosphere of the film. It is against such a
background of inner-city degeneration, violence and
crime that the threat of Fascism (epitomized by Mr.
Spica and his cronies) becomes a real peril. Fascism
and economic recession together are what render
transparent many otherwise opaque or hidden
connections, which make up some of the key themes
of the agenda on the radical right...The fact that the
decadent, upper-class customers are utterly
indifferent to Mr. Spica’s tumult and disruption in
the restaurant also suggests the extent to which a
sector of society passively colluded with Thatcher’s
famously insensitive politics.”
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Chantal Cornut-Gentille-D’Arcy “The Cook, the Thief, his
Wife and her Lover
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“Trained as a painter,
Greenaway has a
wonderful eye and his
films are always
imaginately composedparticularly striking in
their use of décor and
color…clothing style, a
study in red and black, is
imitated by Albert and
his hoods as if they’re
attending a masquerade
party.”
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Quart
“For me, film has a modern way of
painting pictures”
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Greenaway
“The painterly effects are furthered
by color coding the various rooms.
The threatening dining room is
blood-red; the bathroom where
Michael and Georgina first make
love is a dazzling white on
white…It’s all extremely lavish and
sensual- even the shot of maggots
devouring rotten meat…For a
director who supposedly inveighs
against consumerism and greed, he
obviously takes a great deal of
pleasure in both the munificent and
the corrupt.”
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Quart
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“The film’s pictorial
references must be
examined from this
double perspective.
Probably the Frans Hals
painting…which
dominates the principal
setting of the film, Le
Hollandais restaurant,
most clearly links formal
and sociopolitical
concerns.”
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Johnston
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“Setting in this film does
not function as mere
background . The film sets
up a structure of imitation
in relation that does not
function in an
unidirectional way. That is
to say, the feasting
Haarlem corps is a
representation of
conspicuous consumption
duplicated by Spica and his
gang.”
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Johnston
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“The two lovers are edenic
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projections in the recurrent
nakedness. Various recesses of
the kitchen where their lovemaking goes on turn into a lush
primeval world lit in blues and
greens, while their forced
exodus into the foggy meat
freezer, followed by the meat
van packed with rotting meat
and crawling with vermin,
appropriately signal the
suffering and hostility of the
post-fall world.”
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Beatrice Fink “Sadean savouries
in Peter Greenaway’s The
Cook…”
The New Testament may
be read into the film’s final
scenes when Michael the
lover’s death quite literally
turns into a cleverly
wrought transfiguration,
while the Miserere theme
music, a non-verbal
language of sorts, often
speaks louder than words.
Given the film’s
spectacular climax, it is
tempting to title it The Last
Supper.
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Fink
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“Greenaway stresses the allpervading presence of eating and 
digesting (or indigesting) as being
an image of human corporeality,
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with cannibalism- ‘perhaps the
furthest obscenity practiced on one
human being to another.’
Elsewhere he states that The
Cook…functions as ‘a metaphor
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about the conflict between
creativity and consumption, and
the way they are destabilized by
desire and excess.’
“In the film’s grand finale, there is
a dramatic role reversal in which
the formerly victimized Georgina
turns persecutor and executioner.
This is Sade with an edifying
ending.”
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Fink
Fink relates Greenaway’s film to the
works of Marquis de Sade; a French
aristocrat, politician and writer
Sade was famous for his liberal
sexual beliefs, violence coupled with
sexuality and an emphasis on
forgoing morality
“The ways in which the film’s food
and meals become discursive again
lead us to Sade, one should keep in
mind Greenaway’s libertines, if that
term may be applied to Albert and
his cronies, are weaklings…Albert is
a bully who inflicts suffering on his
victims, but who, in many ways, is
straight, despite being a thief.”
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Fink
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Quart, Leonard. "Review: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife
and Her Lover." Cinéaste 18.1 (1990): 45-47. JSTOR. Web.
JSTOR
Fink, Beatrice. "Sadean Savouries In Peter Greenaway's The
Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover." Paragraph 23.1
(2000): 98. Academic Search Premier. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.
Johnston, Ruth D. "The Staging of the Bourgeois Imaginary
in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" (1990)."
Cinema Journal 41.2 (2002): 19-40. Web. JSTOR
Black, Fiona C. "A Miserable Feast: Dishing Up the Biblical
Body in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover."
Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary
Approaches 14.1 (2006): 110-26. Print.
D'Arcy, Chantal. "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her
Lover." Literature Film Quarterly 27.2 (1999): 116. Academic
Search Premier. Web.