The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover. Her lover, also known as lust and lust.
Director: Peter Greenaway Peter Greenaway
Starring: Richard Bollinger, Richard Bohringer
Michael gambon michael gambon
Helen mirren helen mirren
France/Netherlands/UK 1989 co-produced.
Length: 124 minutes
Albert Spica is a vulgar villain. He and a helper make a living by buying and selling hard and extorting money. Albert is incompetent, so the main content of his married life with his beautiful and moving wife Georgina is torture and beating. His greatest hobby and enjoyment is eating and drinking, and he often takes his subordinates and friends to chef Richard's restaurant. When eating, he always gushes, accusing people around him of inappropriate clothes and manners, telling dirty jokes and anecdotes, and he will be furious if anyone disagrees.
One day, Georgina noticed Michael. He sat alone, reading and eating with a small spoon. His elegance was in sharp contrast to Albert, who swore around him. Michael noticed Georgina's eyes, too, and they soon started having sex in the bathroom.
From then on, every time she came to the restaurant with Albert, Georgina would have sex with Michael in the kitchen in the name of going to the bathroom, and Richard always covered for them. But Albert soon learned about Georgina's betrayal, and he made a scene in the kitchen. With Richard's help, the naked couple hid in a carriage full of rotten maggots.
They hid in the bookstore where Michael worked, and the little boy in the kitchen delivered meals for them. But when the boy came back, he was caught by Albert and his gang, tortured cruelly and admitted to the hospital. Albert found a clue in the book borrowed by the boy. When Georgina went to the hospital to visit the boy, he took someone into the bookstore and stuffed torn pages into Michael's mouth, choking him to death. Georgina begged Richard to make Michael's body into delicious food. On the night of revenge, Albert came to the restaurant closed for "private use" with an invitation. The kitchen door opened, and all the restaurant staff pushed Michael's steaming body over. Georgina forced Albert to eat with a gun. When Albert vomited and ate a small piece, the gun went off and the stage curtain fell. Georgina, the "bride in black", seems to be a god of death, revenging Michael and all those who were insulted and hurt by Albert.
Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, shot in 1989, is as complicated and eccentric as its name, weaving an absurd drama of desire and lust in the identity and relationship of four characters. In the slow motion of the lens, a restaurant with luxurious decoration and rich lights unfolds like a stage, performing gorgeous, grotesque and full of implications.
In this film, Grinaway, a British painter, fully demonstrated his love for painting and drama. When the movie is staged in space, the lens moves in parallel at the position of the disappearing fourth wall, and the scene changes from one space to another without quitting. The artistic design of the film is also closer to the stage style, unnatural, showing different spaces with strong symbolic colors (parking lot: blue, kitchen: green, restaurant: red, bathroom: white), and even the costumes of the characters have changed obviously with the different environmental colors. In addition, the overall narrative of the film is divided into several acts according to time, like a drama. Before each scene begins, the menu of the day is used as a sign. In the close-up, all kinds of food are arranged in exquisite patterns, surrounded by the names of dishes and the number of weeks written in beautiful fonts. Moreover, the film begins with two waiters pulling the curtain and ends with the scarlet curtain, which constitutes a complete closed stage time.
Our ancestors have long said: eating color is also. In this film, sexual desire and appetite are inextricably linked, which takes place in a place where appetite is indulged and sexual desire is tolerated. But the ancestors didn't say how this property would unfold and what it would derive. The film has stripped off layers of possibilities in the gorgeous consumption spectacle. It can be art, life, warmth and elegant background. For example, Georgina and Michael's lingering bodies in the bread cabinet, Richard skillfully cut cabbage, red pepper and cucumber. It can also be cruel and bring death, cruel and rude. For example, Albert wants to go to a restaurant for dinner. He puts the pages in Michael's mouth. But in the end, it is also the mysterious sacrifice of purification and revenge, which is condensed in Michael's humiliated and carefully cooked body in the sad hymn of the boy being strangled.
Albert is an individual sadist, frantically reducing everything around him to the level of his taste and enjoyment. At the beginning of the film, he beat the debtor in the parking lot, stripped him naked and smeared dog shit on him. Since then, the image of this shit has been accompanied by his lip-shaping behavior. As he himself said, in his enjoyment, it is the most useful and the dirtiest. He kept eating (ingesting) and talking (expelling). He told an anecdote about Indians drinking their own urine, and people around them vomited from time to time. But in the end, when facing Michael's body, he lost his ability to act. He was so scared that he began to vomit and fell to the ground like a pile of feces. It can be said that it was not Georgina's bullet, but his own way of arbitrarily imposing desires and others, which in turn retaliated against him and reduced him to the prototype of shit. In him, human nature is fully abnormal, because of impotence, desire regresses to greed and cruelty of oral consolidation and anal consolidation.
Symbolically speaking, Albert is also a typical image of wanton waste and violence in today's consumer society. Whether in the creative kitchen or the civilized bookstore, he is a rude intruder and can only bring chaos and destruction. When he is eating and drinking in the restaurant, there are always a group of wild dogs growling and biting people in the parking lot outside to eat the rest of the meat. This civilization and barbarism are both consumed and abandoned, and reconciled by the principle of currency entry and exit. Albert called himself an "artist" because he "put business (money) and entertainment (food) together". And he is indeed an artist of an era, although it is only opposite to artists in the cultural sense. Just as the painting "Banquet for Officials of St. George's Civic Association" by the Dutch painter hals in the restaurant is juxtaposed with Albert's banquet, the former turns his head away from the food in the painting and stares at their eating and drinking; Albert's endless nonsense is in sharp contrast to his silence.
Albert has been judging others, holding a noisy right to speak in his hand, and people around him either cater to him, avoid him or get hurt by him. However, the film subtly transferred the evaluation of Albert to the two cars of meat he brought, and predicted his death in advance with shocking pictures. When Richard refused to use them as raw materials on the pretext of quality assurance, Albert boasted, "I'm here to represent quality and provide quality assurance." As a result, these "quality-oriented" chickens, ducks and fish have no chance to enter Albert's body, but quietly rot in front of the restaurant, emitting a terrible stench, making the parking lot ravaged by wild dogs a real hell.
Michael is a symbol of culture and meditation. He was addicted to the world of books, and only because of Georgina's lust did he temporarily enter the secular world of the restaurant. Their bodies fit mysteriously, but they are similar but different. In the world of restaurants, Georgina's clothes always change sensitively with the color of the environment, and she seems to be able to blend into every different space at any time without any difficulty. On the other hand, Michael is always changing. His brown suit never changes color. Even if his body was cooked, it was brown. It is precisely because of the change and invariability of Georgina and Michael that their respective roles and functions are determined, which makes the fragile Michael die because of Albert's rude borrowing of culture, and also makes the flexible Georgina kill Albert by imitating but distorting the object of Albert's desire.
It is precisely because of this similar difference in their way of thinking that their love has become illusory and a drama of lust. In the film, they love or dream of the space, that is, the white bathroom or the golden bookstore; Or food space, that is, bread cabinets, vegetable cabinets and meat cabinets in the kitchen. This is suspended love, just like the difficult sex moves they have always adopted. So when Georgina asked Richard to cook Michael's body, she said it was "to commemorate our sex in the kitchen and fantasy."
Richard, the chef ranked first in the film title, performed his own function as a director to some extent. He is the director behind the drama in the film, he indulges and satisfies Albert's appetite, and he guides and protects Georgina and Michael's lust. Finally, it was he who turned Michael's body into a cruel work of art and made the whole play slip into complete black. At the same time, like the audience, he is also a pair of eyes for peeping and witnessing. After Michael's death, he relayed their sex scenes to Georgina to ensure the authenticity of this short-lived erotic drama.
Finally, by way of digression, the chef Richard in the film is played by French actor Richard Bollinger. He has an elf-like daughter, romana, who starred in the shocking gay movie Crazy Night at the age of 65,438+07. See the relevant chapters in this book for details.