By now, it is certainly no longer news to any reader of the daily movie review pages that Peter Greenaway is that serious quality director whose latest film was rated X by the Motion Picture Assocation of America. Faced with the rating, he and his distributor, Miramax, decided to release The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover uncut and uncensored.
The film, which earned its X given its much-publicized scenes of cannibalism, coprophilia, copulation, nudity, torture, and bloodlust, has played for several months in top theaters in most cities, perhaps thanks to - rather than in spite of - the MPAA's judgment. A spokeswoman for the film's distributor reported that the rating came from the “overall tone” of the film, and that “there's no one scene they [the producers] could delete in order to get an R.” Mind you, the New York Times the critic found it “a work so intelligent and powerful that it evokes our best emotions and least civil impulses, so esthetically brilliant that it expands the boundaries of film itself.”
To evaluate or dismiss Cook, Thief exclusively on the grounds of its sensational rating is unfair to the film, its creator, and its public. Despite all the nasty content, the film is indeed and extraordinary display of cinematic virtuosity, and undeniably the product of a mind of great cultivation and talent.
Who Is This Enfant Terrible?
To begin with, Greenaway is no enfant. He is a 47-year-old Englishman with the demeanor of an Oxford don. He has devoured the classics of his own nation and era, together with those of several others. He is equally at home discussing Dante Alighieri, AIDS, Jacobean melodrama, Augustan Rome, or the popularity of Margaret Thatcher.
The setting of Cook, Thief is an elegant London restaurant dominated by Franz Hals's famous painting, The Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Civic Guard Company. Among Greenaway's literary inspirations were Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and John Ford's 'Tis A Pity She's a Whore. There is a distinct flavor of the dark and bloody Jacobean drama about the work. Hardly the product of your usual X film director's mind.
Before coming to film, Greenaway had tried his luck as both a painter and a novelist. By his own admission, nobody bought his pictures and nobody read his books. He returned to making films in the mid-sixties and has worked assiduously at expanding the horizons of video as well as of traditional film. In addition to Cook, Thief, his feature film oeuvre includes The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987), and Drowning by Numbers (1988).
Yet his work does not seem fully realized. Although Greenaway has a fascination with banal characters, he does not seem interest in explaining why we should share his interest. For example, Albert Spica, the “thief” in Cook, Thief (played by Michael Gambon, who was so brilliant in BBC's singing Detective last year), roughs up his opponents, browbeats his henchmen, and alternately ignores and manhandles his wife, But to what end?
In one of the more celebrated sequences in Cook, Thief, Spica follows his wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren), to the
...
Read Full Article
|
