The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover: Peter Greenaway’s 1991 classic film, the only one of his that ever broke through to a relatively wide audience, has been unavailable for many years. Released in the brief but awkward period when the MPAA was trying to figure out how to replace the X rating, Greenaway’s film went out unrated and uncut in theaters; however, when it reached Blockbuster and most other video stores, half an hour was cut out, and a proper transfer of the intact cut never made it to DVD in the States. I first saw The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover six years ago on a bootleg DVD that was running at the wrong frame rate, with a transfer likely sourced from European television. Despite its absence, the title was and is so evocative that it lodged itself firmly in the pop cultural lexicon, never to leave. I knew about the movie when I was a kid, simply because of the Simpsons episode “The Mook, the Chef, the Wife and Her Homer.” It’s not a title that you forget, even if people invariably mix up or fuck up the final two nouns and pronouns.
It’s hard to imagine anybody making such a bold film now—not only for its frank sexual content, but for its conviction to a particular formalism. Greenaway’s camera moves laterally, and while there are a handful of very slow dolly-in’s, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover moves from left to right, with much of the set showing and a cornucopia of things that shouldn’t be there. Wes Anderson’s the only major filmmaker working today with such an extreme, in-your-face style, and that’s precisely what he’s criticized for most often: having a style.
Generation Z now outnumber Millennials at the movies. My generation doesn’t like being challenged, they don’t like being provoked, and they’re not comfortable with their own gut instincts because they embraced politics as pop culture nearly a decade ago and abdicated their cultural responsibilities for liberal politics du jour. Millennials love following rules and being told what to do. The reason there isn’t a Millennial film like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover is because our generation doesn’t believe in individualism or risk; the consensus generation would’ve never allowed, much less produced, a filmmaker like Peter Greenaway, and we’re worse off for it. I have hope for Generation Z, who are as pissed and defiant as we should’ve been. When I saw a revival of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover last week, I was far from the youngest person there.
Sirāt: Why was this movie so hyped last year? It was popular at Cannes, but didn’t get bought in time for awards season in the States—was it buried like Julia Ducournau’s Alpha? No no no, this was never going to be The Secret Agent or even It Was Just an Accident. Oliver Laxe’s film begins and ends in the desert, where a bunch of ravers dance all night to the most awful music you’ve ever heard. By the time they take LSD and start falling off of cliffs and stepping on landmines, you really don’t care, because this all could’ve been avoided if you stayed out of the desert and had better taste in music. What does it all mean? You only ask that question when a movie isn’t working, or when you’re bored. Sirāt isn’t “transfixing,” it isn’t “revelatory,” it’s just yet more EURO TRASH full of terrible music and idiots with nothing better to do. Sirāt is guilty of the worst sin in cinema: it is terminally BORING!
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