The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

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  October 1, 2009

  SirPant

  Visually, I loved it. Every frame was like a painting, like theatre on film. The story, a little contrived. I get the whole heaven and hell thing, the restaurant being the universe and all, I just didn't like it. The acting was superb, Gambon playing the Devil was inspired, it?s ...( read more)just not that great to watch and ultimately, that's the point! I don't know, rating this one is hard, I'm a fan of Peter Greenaway but this isn't his best and nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is!

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  January 15, 2009

  bradwest

  Greenaway's idiosyncratic directorial style is in full bloom here in his most notorious film. A visual and technical blend of theatrical and filmic sensibilities while retaining touches of painterly values in choosing the color coordination of set pieces.
  
  A somewhat simple tal...( read more)e of infidelity with a gangster's wife turns into a high art horror show. You have to go back to 70's Ken Russell to find something so outrageous taken seriously.

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  October 26, 2008

  rubystevens

  a brutal gangster film with set design like northern rennaissance painting, costumes by gaultier and a wonderful score. great cast, especially michael gambon, who plays an absolute monster. tracing an explicit relationship between food, sex and death, it's not for the easily of...( read more)fended. this was my first greenaway and it was extraordinary

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  August 18, 2007

  YosemiteSamFan

  Gruesome and offensive, set in a restaurant, enough to make one lose their appetite. A wealthy thief (Michael Gambon) plays a cruel boorish husband who delights in mentally torturing his wife (Helen Mirren). She has an affair with a librarian (Alen Howard). Chaos, murder and reve...( read more)nge ensue! It's an intelligent and interestingly shot film. Some of the scenes were intense. Very memorable characters and grotesque situations.

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  June 12, 2007

  thefog1331

  Visually stunning and deeply disturbing. It's a powerful, sometimes (blackly) funny, drama about love, hate and restaurants. For fans of David Lynch and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. And one of the best scores of all time by Michael Nyman. Do NOT bother seeing it unless its the widescreen ...( read more)unrated cut. Anything else is crap!

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  December 16, 2009

  ElCochran90

  "Try the cock, Albert. It's a delicacy, and you know where it's been."
  
  THE COOK THE THIEF HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (1989)
  
  Director: Peter Greenaway
  Country: United Kingdom / France
  Genre: Comedy / Crime / Drama / Romance
  ...( read more)>Length: 124 minutes
  
  
  
  As any brilliant avant-garde film, Peter Greenaway's absolute masterpiece is an attack to the senses. This attack, however, has the sensual danger of awakening the most primitive instincts of the human being. It has always been interesting to notice Greenaway's past focus on architectonic stillness and provocative imagery with symbolic representations. This film is no exception. Conglomerating bizarre elements and a literally unbeatable sense of humor that abounds in cleverness and intellectualism, this groundbreaking story has obviously received a mixed balance of positive and negative reviews. For those who can grab a book and read between lines, for those who appreciate Ernest Hemingway and Wim Wenders, for those who have accepted the concept of artistic subjectivity, for those who can open their minds to new forms of expression regardless of the scandalous means, The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover is the sexy artwork that appreciative audiences have been expecting and that narrow-minded people will immediately regret without the chance of reconsideration. The following review, like the rest of the existent ones, is equally subject to debate and is, therefore, personally analytical.
  
  Albert Spica is a brutally barbaric and ruthless crime boss who just happens to be the owner of the luxurious restaurant Le Hollandais. His wife, Georgina Spica, becomes bored with her current marriage and secretly begins an extramarital affair between meals with a bookseller. The film explodes in an orgy of food, violence, perverted sex, excrement, torture and cannibalism as the film advances after Albert desperately seeks answers of the bookseller's location. The film received 5 nominations at the Catalonian International Film Festival of Sitges for Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Original Soundtrack, Best Director and Best Film, winning the first four awards and losing the last one against Matthew Chapman's Heart of Midnight (1988). The film also received a European Film Award nomination for Best Production Designer in 1990.
  
  The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover carries out its main functions: to shock, disturb and to remain in the realm of an interpretation's relativity. Consequently, there is no exact meaning of the film. Heavy in artistry and sickening depravities, Greenaway plagues the film with religious symbols, an exaggerate number of references towards past cultures and its outcomes in the actuality, unconventionally hilarious comedy and unbelievable situations of disorder. The most famous version of the events that critics have come up with is translating them as a criticism towards Thatcherism, the highly unpopular government led by the British Conservative politician Margaret Thatcher. On the other hand, we have religious allegories. And then again, we have a parody of the bourgeois class. Nevertheless, the real terror of Greenaway's vision is to make us question about the total number of similarities that we, as members of a falsely democratic and/or organized society, share with the fictional characters incarnated by a terrific cast that includes the actors Helen Mirren, Tim Roth and the famous Michael Gambon (better known for his role as the Professor Albus Dumbledore).
  
  Nevertheless, the whole atmosphere of The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover suggests that the film tries to explain more than merely being a feature that constructs a political criticism. The different perspectives are indefinitely endless: sexual, political, stereotypical, psychoanalytical and cinematographic are basic examples. Naturally, the film draws several lines and all of them are shown briefly. A soulless and blaspheme protagonist as the unstoppable machinist of a liberalist world has an unsatisfied wife who hides terrible psychological secrets beneath her persona, finally becoming a deadly femme fatale. Of course, the deliciously satirical trio would not be complete without the naive and intellectual mind. This mind, of course, had to be heavily emphasized through the construction of a literary world. In this way, the Cook Richard is the typically dutiful citizen that serves a particular function for the sake of a portion of the society through the unconscious following of specific orders: the task is what matters in the end. The Thief Albert is the despicable promoter of Thatcherite economical blindness and political overpowerment, resulting in the submission of his surrounding environment to his predominant influence and, ultimately, his will. The Wife Georgina irrevocably supports the idealized image of a conventional Britain: an unfulfilled, disappointed nation that forcedly was put in the necessity of urging for a better stabilized situation. The Lover, as it was already mentioned, is the literary guileless of intellectualism, an ideology primarily consisting of dreamed outcomes without resorting to the effectiveness and benign positivism of meaningful actions.
  
  Greenaway has assigned specific colors for every scenario. The exterior of the restaurant is mostly blue, referencing a Paradise that has been lost because of the never-ending humankind's maliciousness. The kitchen is predominantly green, representing the source of vitality, the "nature" of man, paralleling the original source of the world's wonders with the original source of the body's energy: food. The seating area of Le Hollandais is red, like if the place belonged to a hellishly atmosphere. The restroom, the first physical place where the affair is shown, is white, like if the characters were trying to hide their identities under the glowing presence of light and clarity, yet not escaping from the inevitability of a precarious existence. These are the facts that caused some points of view to state that the more we witnessed portrayals of profanity on screen, the more we were attracted towards the climax. Some other opinions point at the exact opposite side. Consequently, another questioning is originated: Is it morally correct to disguise with inventiveness and ingenuity a masterly orchestrated opera of visual beauty, multicultural genius and emotionally shocking subject matter?
  
  How is this mess decorated? Greenaway took inspiration from the mural painted in the year of 1616 by Frans Hals called "The Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Militia of Haarlem", which is displayed on the back wall of the dining room, and adapted the colorful art direction and the royal costume design. In case this wasn't enough, the film was based on John Ford's 17th-century play of revenge 'Tis Pity She's a Whore', where a man marries a woman who became pregnant because of his brother and, along with his servant, seeks revenge. Objectively speaking, the principal approach of the film is psychological, contrasting the emotional features of the characters with us, the primitively voyeuristic audience. A gracious and elegant cinematography adopts several faces, from minimalism to architectonical balance. Lengthy shots parallel and even mock the digestive system and the most common reactions of a particular individual towards certain events while we, horizontally, are transported to a new claustrophobic scenario of lunatic euphoria. On a personal note, I cannot imagine the complex screenwriting process derived from Greenaway's remarkable genius; nonetheless, it masquerades its blasphemous content and its insulting racism with a very original style.
  
  So, in the end, what is The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover? Is it a satire? Is it a comment on consumerism, or is it a testament of the upper class nauseating degradation? Does it deal with consumerism? Is it an attack towards the low morality of fast food enterprises, or must we accept the original sin of the nature of man as the strongest antagonist of the story? Is it about the restaurant, its contrast with the literary world of a library, or about earthly perversions? These futile questions and more conclusions will have no definite answer because they are not supposed to have one. Fact is, this is an avant-garde masterpiece of symbolic surrealism and provocative thematic material, from the Gardens of Eden to the earthly, Shakesperian orgies of food and betrayal. The more hated this film has been, the better it gets; the more underrated Peter Greenaway has got throughout the decades, the more brilliant he has become.
  
  100/100

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  November 10, 2009

  dipa89

  
  

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  October 3, 2009

  neowerewolf

  The thing who liked most was the photograpy, the stages, and the colors used in every scene, the same in the costumes and in the set.

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  September 15, 2009

  g0y

  Having seen The Baby of Macon before it Greenaway's style wasn't entirely new in mind but the film still has some incredible pan techniques - it's meant for the big screen and unfortunately for the US it's not even properly available on DVD yet.

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  September 8, 2009

  OldKentuckyShark

  Beautiful sets, explicit sex and violence, and some pretty bad table manners. This movie's got it all. It took me a while to find this one, but it was worth the wait. Thanks Youtube.

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• The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover