![]() ![]() Georgina (Helen Mirren) and her lover (Alan Howard) almost got caught. Here of course, you are entirely on her side, and you shudder with nervousness with her when she and her lover, hidden in the restaurant's bathroom for a sexual tryst, almost get caught by Spica. The character she plays here presents a fascinating contrast to her role as the wife (and criminal partner) of Bob Hoskin's Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday, and yet, as with everything Mirren does, a strength comes through. She never kowtows to her husband even though she knows it will mean she receives abuse, but you're certain that she's not provoking Albert out of a masochistic impulse. Groped by her husband, interrogated constantly, put through all manner of indignities, Georgina manages to keep her poise. Typically also, there is a stoicism or an attempt at stoicism displayed by the primary victim, and in The Cook, the Thief, Helen Mirren embodies this aspect beautifully. In some plays, the avenger gets revenge and lives often the avenger dies along with the object of their vengeance (as in Hamlet). No act is beyond the pale in these dramas, and to forgive is not a choice that anyone takes. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is one such example John Webster's Duchess of Malfi and John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore are two others. The view of human nature is bitter and cynical the language and imagery are baroque and extreme. There is violence, insanity, torture, mutilation, lust. The plots invariably hinge on a real or imagined injury leading to this vengeance, and the plays are blood-soaked. This is a type of English drama popular from the late 1500s through the mid 1600s in which the main motivating factor among the characters is revenge. In structure, Greenaway's film hews to the Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge play. The vengeance they take out on him is horrific, as cruel as anything he did to others, but it's exactly what he deserves. Restaurant staff are among the avengers so are former members of Albert's crew. Richard, Georgina, and all the many people Albert has hurt band together. Emboldened by her grief, Georgina talks revenge, and she convinces the restaurant chef to help her. He lived for something other than power, money, and eating-the things Albert values. Her lover was everything Albert is not: kind, quiet, thoughtful. Everyone knows the explosion that will happen if Albert discovers the affair, and sure enough when he does, the cruelty he enacts on his wife and her lover (and a child who helped them) is monumental. Right under his nose, she takes up with a man who always dines alone while reading a book (Alan Howard), and this affair continues with the help of the restaurant staff. Besides his thugs, he's accompanied each night by his wife Georgina (Helen Mirren), a woman who somehow manages to conduct herself with class and tact while enduring the bellowing onslaughts of her husband. He's a self-proclaimed authority on everything, a person intolerant of dissent. Spica himself is violent and crude, and he holds court from the center of his table. Every night Spica turns up at the restaurant with his entourage of goons, and this boorish group proceed to offend the restaurant staff and customers. ![]() How these ingredients fit together is what makes the film unusual-a film no one but Greenaway, with his distinctive approach to visuals and narrative, could have made.īut let's start with the plot: somewhere in England, a gangster named Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) has bought Le Hollandais Restaurant, run by the French chef Richard (Richard Bohringer). The film is not a conventional gangster picture, but it has at its core the ingredients that make up many a basic crime drama: violence, betrayal, romance, revenge. And yet, in The Cook, the Thief, released in 1989, Greenaway wrote and directed a film that has a gangster, Albert Spica, as its central character. Filmmaker Peter Greenaway, who began his artistic endeavors as a painter, has made a name for himself as a creator of provocative and sometimes experimental works of greater or lesser accessibility ( The Draughtsman's Contract, Prospero's Books, The Tulse Lipper Suitcases), and no one would call him a genre filmmaker of any sort. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is not the first film you're likely to come up with when thinking about British gangster movies. ![]()
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