The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Wow, that’s some start.

Anyway, I got the final two of Greenaway’s 80s movies in the mail the other week. This 2K version looks pretty good — not overly restored or tinkered with.

I’ve seen this before — probably on VHS in like 1991? I did not remember it being this… stylised? It’s Greenaway’s big breakthrough movie, commercially, and I remembered it being more conventional? But perhaps that was just in contrast to his earlier movies that I’d seen at the Cinematheque by this point.

Yes, yes, hipsters, yes…

OK, I take back the thing I said about the transfer — shots like this have a lot of details, but there’s digital artifacting going on? That is, there’s pixels that, like, “shimmer” in the way old-fashioned CGI used to — when there’s too much information and the algo can’t decide on what the colour value for the pixels should be. Very odd. Haven’t seen that in a while. Could this be a very old digitisation? Did they even do 2K back in the olden days?

I’m so cynical… OK, the thing here seems to be that Helen Mirren is married to the most vulgar, uncultured crime boss ever, so she looks across the restaurant and immediately falls in lust with this nerd (because he reads a book).

And that’s definitely a fantasy nerds have — that if they display their culturedness (that’s a word), then a gorgeous woman like Helen Mirren will immediately want to have sex with them. That’s fine! But the casting! To make this a bit more plausible, couldn’t they have cast somebody who was even slightly attractive here? I know, I know, this is the fantasy of an older (not very attractive) man (I’m presuming), so that wouldn’t be their first choice, but c’mon. Didn’t anybody around Greenaway say “actually, more attractive actors exist”?

There’s the unfortunate whiff of cringe about “the vulgars”… She just asked about a bottle of Chianti with the “wrapping” so that she can take it home and hang it on the wall, and that’s just hilarious! So funny! Ha ha!

I’m beginning to think that Greenaway is a bit of a dick.

Very Last Dinnerish.

That’s what I want my toilet to look like.

Is that Ian Dury?

I can understand why this movie mad such a splash, both culturally and commercially. Greenaway keeps showing us this awful guy doing awful things, pointing at him “isn’t he awful? huh? isn’t he? look! he’s awful? see? *hee hee*”, i.e., The Sopranos Approach, and people love that.

I just found that bit tedious as fuck, and it goes on and on and on. Not to speak of the ultraviolence. It’s not a movie to watch while you’re eating.

Now, there’s other things here that are enjoyable — the staging (especially the kitchen), the music, the rotting trucks and some of the cinematography. And the colours! You can only dream about colours like this with recent movies.

But this isn’t as good as Greenaway’s good movies.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Peter Greenaway. 1989. ⚃