Screen:
Alleva, Richard
SOMETHING TO GAG ON GREENAWAY'S 'COOK' The English film director Peter Greenaway is a startling picture maker and a lousy storyteller. In Cinematic Utopia he would be commissioned to create short,...
...Greenaway's stories not only begin in his imagination, they remain there even after being filmed...
...Greenaway's characters dance attendance only upon their creator's whims...
...she jeers at the fallen villain...
...But, because he works in a business which produces mainly fictional features, Greenaway goes through the motions of doing what most other directors do: the making of movies that tell stories that have characters, settings, emotions, and that seem to take place somewhere on our planet, some time in our history...
...Are we to praise him for making the art house groundlings giggle...
...And so he does...
...If the thief is Head Barbarian, why don't the restaurant patrons recognize him...
...My eyes fall upon the news photo of a mother running through the streets of Lebanon after learning that all three of her children have been killed by a terrorist bomb...
...I winced at some of the abominations in Cook but walked out of the theater without dread...
...And how about those "vile jellies" in King Learl It's easy to see why Cook might be taken as political allegory if you were to simply summarize its plot: a hoodlum and his gang go to a French restaurant (of which the hoodlum is the chief financial support) and there behave, over the course of several visits, in a loathsome manner...
...Shakespeare started as a purveyor of cheap thrills but grew into a conveyer of profound shudders...
...I can hear the arguments for the defense already: (1) Since this film is an allegory of either freebooting capitalism or totalitarian oppression, the dramatist must be forceful in his presentation of political tyranny...
...No matter what his admirers claim for him, Greenaway is probably interested in neither allegory nor cruel catharsis...
...He is a postmodernist par excellence...
...They pour their loot onto tables, discuss deals, chivy the cook and staff, insult and batter the guests, regurgitate their food in public...
...Perhaps Cook is not an allegory but a piece of Jacobean cinema, an example of cruelty as catharsis that shouldn't be held to strict standards of plotting and characterization...
...The End...
...RICHARD ALLEVA Richard Alleva was formerly the movie critic for Crisis magazine.risis magazine...
...And so Greenaway does and does and does...
...When the thief raids a ladies' room in search of his wife and slams open the stalls, Greenaway gets a chance to show an old woman sitting on a toilet...
...The thief's wife, treated by him more as moll than mate but possessing a certain innate refinement (and played with provocative, tender-tough suppleness by Helen Mirren), notices a man eating and reading in a corner of the dining room...
...In Cinematic Utopia he would be commissioned to create short, abstract works packed with dazzling and abrasive images linked together only by formal aptness and some kind of dream logic...
...But soon we are trying to wriggle out of those hands, for who wants to be in the grip of someone who can see and not think...
...But even an allegory, perhaps especially an allegory, must have a surface logic if we are to follow the story closely enough to grasp the underlying meaning...
...Happy movie going...
...Perhaps...
...They are embryos that grow to monstrous life without ever being born...
...What police...
...What rivals...
...He imagines and stages the various segments of his story for the maximum frisson each part will produce without regard as to how the parts will interlock, reflect on each other, and cohere to create unity, substance, beauty...
...It's the whimsy in Greenaway's work that repels me, not the ferocity...
...With rival gangsters...
...her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out...
...who can compose a picture but not care about his own characters...
...This director likes to conjure images of suffering flesh, and so his characters are called into existence in order to be tortured...
...She shoots him dead...
...He is Brute Rule incarnate, Big Bully if not Big Brother, and the well-dressed patrons must represent the affluent but passive sector of society (bourgeoisie...
...Since no one calls the cops, the viewer must assume that the thief himself is in charge of society...
...that puts up with tyranny...
...The man (a bookseller) and the wife begin an affair and carry it on in various nooks and crannies of the large restaurant...
...Cannibal...
...If there were a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Fictional People, I would immediately send it to the rescue of the protagonists of The Draughtsman's Contract and Greenaway's latest, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover...
...In trouble with whom...
...We despise the author of Titus Andronicus for coasting on cruelty to get easy shudders from the groundlings...
...Just how powerful is this thief, and in what sort of society does he live...
...One seldom felt, while watching a good Bunuel or Peckinpah film, that the plot was being jerked about in order to nail the characters...
...2) Greenaway does no worse than Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights...
...The wife, aided by the cook and a veritable parade of all the people injured and insulted by the thief, traps her husband in the dining room, and serves him the body of her lover-which has been cooked by the chef at the wife's request...
...But, curiously enough, self-indulgent cruelty in art disturbs far less than cruelty serving as an indispensable element in an ordered whole...
...Alas, poor characters...
...He does it all to his characters and, dear reader and viewer, he does it all to you...
...After the inevitable discovery is made, the lover is sadistically killed: stuffed with, and smothered by his own books...
...Dextrous filmmaking helps: as the camera pans, left to right, from the blue brutality of the restaurant's courtyard (where the thief beats the victims) through the underwater green of the kitchen (where the lovers stop time with their passion) to the splashy red vulgarity of the dining room (where gorging, disgorging, anger, and lewd-ness dominate), we know we are in the hands of a master visu-alizer...
...Greenaway, as a filmmaker, is much more sophisticated at this stage of his career than Shakespeare was as a versemaker while writing Titus Andronicus...
...Greenaway can't suggest an answer because his film has no vision of the dynamics of a society, something that all good allegories, from The Republic to The Castle to Lord of the Flies, have...
...Or, to be precise, it's the whimsy that makes the ferocity sickening...
...No, as Anna Russell says about Wagner's operas, I am not making any of this up...
...Here, cruelty rules the dramatist...
...Not so with Greenaway's new work...
...He wants to show the eating of food alongside the vomiting of it...
...Through about one-third of its running time, Cook holds the audience with its cat-and-mouse melodrama of brutal husband and furtive adulterers...
...Seem to, but don't...
...socialist elite...
...Because special effects departments are wizardly these days, Greenaway can create the illusion of the bookseller's chest cracked open by torturers and stuffed with paper...
...We venerate the author of King Lear for widening and deepening our perception of what life can be at its worst...
...Gun in hand, she forces him to dig in, and gagging and vomiting, he does...
...Remember Titus Andronicus "with Lavinia ravished...
...With the police...
...Bunuel's Los Olvidados kept me from sleep, and my father complained that Straw Dogs had the same effect on him...
...No one expects an allegory to operate as a realistic drama does...
...Sam Peckinpah and Luis Bunuel were other filmmakers with insatiable appetites for violence...
...Greenaway's cruelties are too arbitrary and too arty to haunt...
...Queasy laugh from audience...
...Having destroyed the bookseller, the thief is warned by a henchman that he may get into trouble for the murder...
...And so he does...
...But Greenaway's mind and sensibility operate at the level of Grand Guignol...
...But, in their best work, cruelty reared its head only when a certain narrative logic bid it rise...
Vol. 117 • June 1990 • No. 11
