The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Peter Greenaway 1989

Greenaway's most prescient work of social realism since The Falls (1980) came out a decade into the Thatcherite revolution. It was made with Dutch money, presumably after British producers were horrified by its implication, in the early parts of the screenplay, that a genuine English businessman might be interested in foreign food.

An energetic, straight-talking entrepreneur with a robust sense of humour takes over the restaurant of an immigrant with a semi-permeable accent and holds buccaneering court there over several days. His surname, besides its obvious pun on "speaker," is an anagram of "aspic," a meat-based jelly used as a preservative and an obvious symbol of a culture trapped and immobile amid the gammon flab.

Albert buys in quantities of gaudy cutlery without thought for its quality, force-feeds dog excrement to one rival and scolds another for reading at table. His rival for vocal supremacy is a child whose melodic enunciations verge on the foreign in their stylised unintelligibility; his sexual rival is a librarian with an interest in European history, whom Albert suspects of being Jewish. The first is silenced by means of child torture, the second by being forced to choke on a vandalised history of the French revolution.

Sheltered by the immigrant, the lovers are eventually caught through a loan to the child of his choice of books. Such a naïve and outdated belief in culture, so relaxed an attitude to education, and such conceptions of choice as determined by unprofitable curiosity, were blatantly outdated in 1989 and today seem more surreal than either the cook's magic cavern of a kitchen or the wife's poetic revenge.

A more succinct summation of the present-day British psyche than the Spica couple could scarcely be conceived. While telling the dead Michael about Albert's crimes against her, Georgina briefly notes that she once ran away and, before being repatriated with an earful of false promises and then humiliated and beaten again, found temporary refuge in Brussels.