The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989)

We have been enjoying a movie newsletter which contains some current movies, but is largely made up of long ago movies, some of them less easy to find, that were perhaps under appreciated in their own time or now. The idea is that we revisit them with a modern eye and see what we think. This film, which is a combination of a Salvador Dali movie with Rocky Horror Picture Show and perhaps The Meaning of Life. 

Picture it if you will. The movie has a lot of violence and some male (and female) full frontal nudity, as well as some graphic language and sex that in it's time it was teetering on the verge of an X-rating. In many ways the abuse that is meted out is the most disturbing aspect of the movie. The wife is clearly battered and no one says a word about it, preferring to look the other way, which is exactly how such women end up dead, killed by their batterers. The movie takes place against a dystopian backdrop where there is a pack of dogs roaming the streets and no people whenever the camera ventures out of the restaurant where most of the action takes place.There is an almost play-like quality to the movie, where very little of the action takes place outside of the front of the house of a high end restaurant or in the back of the house in the same dining facility. A boorish mobster dines there night after night with his underworld colleagues and he bullies each and every one of them to the point that they are sick--sometimes literally. Helen Mirren plays his long suffering wife, Georgina. She eyes a fellow dining patron, and begins a quite torrid affair with him first in the bathroom and then in various rooms in the back of the restaurant, where they care not who sees them, and rely completely on the staff's discretion. All does not end well for the lovers, and it is an unexpected and yet fitting end to the whole sordid tale.