Luke Turner and John Doran went into the subject for this month’s Low Culture Podcast convinced it was a cult yet popular landmark of British cinema… yet it transpired that Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is nigh on impossible to stream in the usual places, and the only two references to it on tQ were in questions by John in interviews, specifically with Kate Bush and Richard Dawson. The Cook, The Thief… is shot as much as a theatrical play as it is a work of cinema, giving the narrative of Michael Gambon’s gangster Albert Spica’s gluttonous and tasteless pretentions and fascistic violence a claustrophobic intensity. It’s a film that is arguably in a strange meeting place of the British gangster flick (though think Performance, Sexy Beast and The Long Good Friday rather than Guy Ritchie), European art house cinema and even the English esotericism of Derek Jarman and Coil. We talk about artificiality in Greenaway’s filmmaking and its relationship to the theatricality of real-life gangsters like the Krays, and how Helen Mirren, who plays Spica’s wife Georgina, travelled to the USA to defend the film’s artistic merit to American censors, who wished to give it an R rating. She was right to do so, for this this is a disturbing film, but a beautifully made one, from the piles of food that sit like the still lives of the Dutch masters, to the framing of shots, the use of colour and symbolism, and Michael Nyman’s wonderful soundtrack. We ask if the sadism and violence means this is a difficult or enjoyable film to watch, and how it went against the political, realist tradition of British cinema of the time. One thing is for certain – few other works of art have quite so effectively and gruesomely explored the notion that revenge is a dish best served cold.
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