A Major Disappointment

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Brutish loud gangster Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) had taken over a high-class restaurant run by chef Richard Boarst. He often takes his suffering high-class wife Georgina (Helen Mirren) and his thugs to the restaurant. She has an affair with regular restaurant customer bookseller Michael during their dinners. Mitchel (Tim Roth) is one of Albert's idiot thugs.This takes place mostly in and around the restaurant in a semi-surreal world. Essentially it looks like filming a stage play. The camera style limits the visceral intensity despite the violence. It is something different and interesting. I am very fond of food porn. This takes it to another level in the different area code. The problem with tension is that everything seems inevitable. Spica is an one-note character. Georgina's affair is seen by everybody in the kitchen. It's inevitable that they would be found out and Spica's action is predictable. Georgina does do crazy original stuff in the last act but it doesn't feel satisfying. It's hard to feel for the character at first. It's not until the last act that her barriers come down. This is an unique film but may not be for the masses.

Notoriously labeled as a uncompromising provocateur, a controversial auteur in the cinema realm, Peter Greenaway's sixth feature film THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER might be his most well-known work to date, it is a sheer revelation to watch, imprinted by its unique palette of the stage setting, gliding long-shots of tableaux vivants, and the excessive verbal abuse from Albert (Gambon), aka, the thief, sometimes commingled with Psalm 52:2 sung by a boy soprano.Scatology, sadism, nudity, necrophilism all take their turns in this black comedy, happens in an upmarket French restaurant Le Hollandais, run by chef Richard Boarst (Bohringer), where the foul- mouthed, egoistic, snooty gangster Albert comes every night with his cohorts. In an ostentatious arrangement, Greenaway ingeniously confers a distinctive colour-pattern (green, red, white) to three main sets (the kitchen, the restaurant and the lavatory) - where food is possessed, consumed and eventually excreted - even the characters' costumes are compliant to this pattern."Cook Michael for me, will you?", pleads Georgia (Mirren), the wife, to Richard, Michael (Howard) is her inamorato, tortured to death by her jealousy ridden Albert. Cannibalism has entered this highly conceptualised allegory in its boldest manner, served as the ultimate poetic justice to the basest vulgarity, pomposity and violence.Among the four titular characters, Georgia is the victim, married into wealth but is abused by her brute husband on a daily base, there is a shocking soliloquy she addresses to Michael's dead body about her agony which she is too ashamed to tell him when he was alive. To conduct tryst everyday in the restaurant under Albert's eyelids is the only rebellion she is capable of doing, and she is quite good at it until the truth goes out inevitably. She should and must be the one to relish the thrill of a thorough revenge. Mirren emerges as a gutsy and sensual heroine in this unheralded performance here.Michael, a bookshop owner, an intellectual whose libidinous impulse will incur his doom, but under Howard's collected mannerism, he couldn't care less about his own safety other than arriving on time for his quotidian rendezvous. Richard, is the secretive abettor of their affair, he detests Albert to the core, but bears a phlegmatic front to avoid getting embroiled, but he will never miss a golden opportunity to exert justice to the lowest of the low as if he is the omnipotent God. Finally, Albert, the scum of the earth, epitomises the pure vice inside a human being, is obnoxious up to the hilt, Gambon wields his master-class theatrics to filibuster for nearly two hours, which is something not everyone can stomach.Integrating food, sex and death to excesses, Greenaway's unapologetically experimental stunner is a sui generis accomplishment, riveting, voyeuristic, provoking, only in the fullness of its running time, it betrays a tint of hesitancy, does the gratifying wind-up taste good? After all, rough justice arrives a tad too rash, if that's the right way to eradicate vice from the world.

When a friend brought the DVD of "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" for me to borrow, he gleefully told me, *you'll see a Dame fully naked." I immediately asked, "Oh yes, would that be Helen Mirren?" to which he told me it was and asked how I had guessed. I said that Helen was famous for doing a revealing movie although I had never seen it and, I must admit, when I began to watch it, I was probably more titillated by the idea of seeing someone famous who I had long been a fan of naked than seeing a movie!However, as the film got under way, it became very apparent that this was no "ordinary" movie (whatever that is). At first, I found myself wondering what on Earth was going on but, as it progressed, I more and more began to feel as though I was at a live performance of a Shakespearian tragedy melodrama. Everything was dramatically overdone and I realised that this was completely intentional. If the naked love-making scenes had been faded out or masked, their impact would have been lost and the same applied to the gory scenes of abject cruelty.I did find myself wondering why Spica's (Gambon) restaurant had any clients at all given the way they were treated by him and his puppet henchmen and women and a number of other anomalies were also puzzling.However, after watching the movie, I thought I'd have a look at what other viewers had to say about it and logged onto IMDb. Amongst the few reviews I read, was one by Minerva Breanne Meybridge which, for me, brilliantly put the whole thing into perspective. Whether Minerva's interpretation is what the producers were aiming for is, of course, open to speculation but, as far as I'm concerned, excellently explains what is, after all, a decidedly bizarre movie.In fact, I would go so far as to say that Minerva's review should almost be mandatory reading before watching the movie.

This movie is unlike anything else out there . That's what makes it great. Not suitable for sensitive individuals. The ending is predictable however. Although it fits in with the story it is perhaps the weakest part of the film. I have watched this movie several times and each viewing is a treat.There is some graphic violence which is not gratuitous (also true of the sex scenes) but is far too graphic for my taste (referring to the violence). Again, however , it does fit in with the general feeling of the movie. Fortunately, it takes up only one short part of the film. Helen Mirren is great as ever even though this was close to the beginning of her career. Every actor stretches his/her acting skills to produce an amazing picture. It is a very, very, dark humour and may not be suitable for everybody.