Daily Dialogue — November 27, 2019

“What you’ve got to realize is that the clever cook puts unlikely things together, like duck and orange, like pineapple and ham. It’s called ‘artistry’. You know, I am an artist the way I combine my business and my pleasure: Money’s my business, eating’s my pleasure and Georgie’s my pleasure, too, though in a more private kind of way than stuffing the mouth and feeding the sewers, though the pleasures are related because the naughty bits and the dirty bits are so close together that it just goes to show how eating and sex are related. Georgie’s naughty bits are nicely related, aren’t they, Georgie?”

— The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), written by Peter Greenaway

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Feast. Today’s suggestion by Renée Anderson.

Trivia: Writer and Director Peter Greenaway uses specific colors to represent each set of this movie. The exterior of Le Hollandais is predominantly blue. The kitchen is mostly green. The seating area of the restaurant is red, and the restrooms are stark white. The color of Georgina’s (Dame Helen Mirren’s) dress and the sashes that Albert (Sir Michael Gambon) and his associates wear change to match this scheme as the characters move from room to room. The color of Georgina’s cigarettes also changes to match the color of the set as she moves.

Dialogue On Dialogue: If you’ve not seen the movie, here is a plot summary: “The wife of a barbaric crime boss engages in a secretive romance with a gentle bookseller between meals at her husband’s restaurant. Food, color coding, sex, murder, torture, and cannibalism are the exotic fare in this beautifully filmed, but brutally uncompromising modern fable.” The tone of the dialogue cited here is a good example of what the movie is like.