The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1990)

Best movie of this year hands down!

A Disappointing Continuation

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I love Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon and Tim Roth. I also love revenge movies. This one was alot of work, and it was not enjoyable at all. The minute I saw Michael Gambon as this character I wanted him dead. With all his braggadocio I don't see MG's character being afraid or intimidated when presented with a cooked man. I would have been happier if MG's character had been boiled alive. Getting shot was just too easy. Overall this is just a dark, depressing movie. Visually it is beautiful the costumes and lighting are amazing, but sitting through it for two hours was just really not fun. And the pay off just left me cold. You want the audience to go YEAH! Instead I was praying for the end.

This is a fearsome, frightening, full frontal extravaganza from true artist, Peter Greenaway. Michael Gambon plays the 'Thief' as a ghastly, gangland supremo with the largest and foulest gob in cinema. Helen Mirren plays the abused and manhandled 'Wife' and is probably her greatest performance. There are many times when the outrageousness of Gambon's character that it is often only the serenity and grounding that Mirren brings that stops this spilling over into farce. It is a brave and open performance not least in her willingness to partake in the scenes of total nudity. Alan Howard as the 'Lover' is fine and his measured and sober performance also helps. Last but not least is the 'Cook' played by Richard Bohinger as a kindly, understanding and long suffering restaurateur who has seen it all before. Well, he might have but this extraordinary feast of fetid stew of nastiness has to be seen to be believed. Michael Nyman's music is a wondrous ingredient, helping to at once make this more bearable but also still rather sinister. This is a work without parallel and whilst you may have to hold your nose and wince a lot, every scene has a beauty, however horrific the goings on. Perhaps, just perhaps a tad too long, is my only reservation.

This is easily Peter Greenaway's most famous film. This is despite, or most probably because, of its somewhat notorious reputation. Whatever the case, this has to be the most accessible film in Greenaway's highly inaccessible filmography. Although this is only a fairly relative statement because, despite having a fairly linear story, this is still very idiosyncratic and odd. It also displays the extremely cold tone that typifies this director's work in general. It could best be described as an art-house film with exploitation film subject matter. It contains all manner of unpleasantness, with physical brutality, humiliation, scatology and cannibalism; while it is sexually very frank with much full-frontal nudity and graphic conversations.So it's a very full-on film content-wise but what makes it very unusual is that it is quite uncommon for this type of material to be presented in quite the way it is here. Its visual style is thoroughly eloquent, with the cinematography of Sacha Vierney being particularly notable. Vierney is perhaps most famous for photographing Greenaway's favourite movie, namely Last Year at Marienbad (1961), a key experimental movie that clearly influenced him in many ways. Like that film, this one looks very lush too, with painterly compositions that are captured in widescreen by the carefully constructed tracking shots. The décor and costuming are both carefully considered, the latter are designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier; both give the film its own self-contained world that is very striking. The other key collaborator is composer Michael Nyman, whose soundtrack is again memorable but heavy going at times, with the high-pitched singing being a little hard to take. The actors do good work, although they are playing types as opposed to realistic characters; Michael Gambon certainly is in his element chewing up the scenery in his role as the obnoxious thief and Helen Mirren makes an impression in the tough role of his downtrodden wife.This is a film I like but with reservations. As always, Greenaway's style is very hard to fully embrace. The unpleasant aspects are slightly more sickening in some ways when presented in his deep-frozen style. While I believe that there is seemingly an allegory on Thatcherism in here apparently, I continually fail to detect it myself, so I simply take its events at face value. This isn't such a bad thing, as I do appreciate the self-contained world Greenaway has created and I do like his commitment to visual ideas. It's certainly a real oddity. It goes without saying but this film is categorically not one for everyone. It's easy to see why people hate it. But it will reward those that can take Greenaway's eccentricities.

I have a problem with art-house films like THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER and it's that the directors of such fare are often totally ignorant when it comes to decent film-making. Sure, they obsess over designer costumes and make-up, and they focus intently on the colour palette of their movies, but when it comes to movie-making staples like pace, character, dialogue, and intrigue, they fail.Peter Greenaway is such a director. This controversial 1989 opus is known for its gruesome scenes of cannibalism, yet take away the controversy and there's absolutely nothing here to rate this. The running time is as slow as a snail, and much of it is made up of scenes of the repulsive Michael Gambon character berating his wife and associates.Greenaway's a better director than he is a writer, because the script is terrible. We get the gist of Gambon's character and the situation with his wife in the first ten minutes, yet two hours of non-action go by in which we're bludgeoned over the head with his sheer monotonous brutish nature. The whole film takes place on a cheap-looking set that quickly becomes boring, Helen Mirren spends most of the running time naked and forgets how to act, and luminaries such as Tim Roth and Ciaran Hinds are wasted.Yes, there are a few shocking scenes, yet cannibalism is dealt with in a much more entertaining fashion in both B-movie fare (such as Pete Walker's 1974 FRIGHTMARE) and Hollywood flicks (like RAVENOUS). I'm not against arty films where nothing happens, but there has to be substance to go with the style; Nic Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW is a case in point: one of my favourite films of all time, but hardly action-packed. THE COOK... just wastes a great deal of potential and proves to be another case of The Emperor's New Clothes.