Amazon.co.uk Review
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is both adored and detested for its combination of sumptuous beauty and revolting decadence. Few directors polarise audiences in the same way as Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker as influenced by Jacobean revenge tragedy and 17th-century painting as by the French New Wave. A vile, gluttonous thief (Michael Gambon) spews hate and abuse at a restaurant run by a stoic French cook (Richard Bohringer), but under the thief's nose his wife (the ever-sensuous Helen Mirren) conducts an affair with a bookish lover (Alan Howard). Clothing (by avant-garde designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) changes colour as the characters move from room to room. Nudity, torture, rotting meat, and Tim Roth at his sleaziest all contribute the atmosphere of decay and excess. Not for everyone, but for some, essential. --Bret Fetzer
Customer Reviews:
Back cover.......2008-02-16
Ace film I cannot recommend it enough but please do not look at the back of this DVD until you've seen it as there is a MAJOR spoiler.
Brutal and grotesque...and a great film.......2007-11-05
This is a movie many people either love or hate; and I like it a lot. It's all style, all color, all rage. A thief (Michael Gambon as Albert Spica) and his wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren) with his toadies and gang members dine each night at the restaurant of the cook (Richard Bohringer). Spica is a monster; crude, loud and a bully with the table manners of a hog. The first scene in the movie is Spica, his gang and their women getting out of their cars in a dark, wet alleyway and preparing to enter the restaurant through the kitchen. But first they deal with a guy who owes Spica money. His gang brings Spica dog excrement on pieces of paper; Spica wipes the stuff all over the other guy's face and mouth. They strip him down while the women watch and Spica continues to smear him. He pokes at the cowering man on the ground with his cane, while others kick at him. Then he urinates on him...but chews out a toadie who was going to do the same because the toadie might offend the women. Spica's behavior doesn't get any better. Georgina Spica wears matyrdom like a cloak. Eating every night in the restaurant is a shy, book-loving man (Alan Howard) who ignores the uproar Albert and his gang create. He and Georgina see each other and he becomes her lover, making love everywhere in the restaurant that they can find where it's quiet, with the help of the cook. The thief finds out and deals with the lover. The wife takes her revenge with the complicity of the cook in a grotesque and appropriate way.
Sounds simple enough, but this movie is a powerhouse. The look of the film, like so much of Greenaway's stuff, is lush and highly stylized. The rooms of the restaurant have their own colors and the costumes of the actors change colors as they move from room to room. The kitchen is huge and strange, with boiling kettles, hanging instruments and tables piled high with glassware and dishes; with geese being plucked in clouds of feathers; with fat, half-naked men stirring steaming sauce pans. A white-haired, retarded boy does simple tasks while singing in a counter-tenor.
The movie, I think, seems to be about anger and retribution. Gambon is a powerful as Albert Spica, completely repellant, domineering and absolutely fascinating. Helen Mirren is superb, and one of the bravest actors around. Her humiliation at the hands of her husband just goes on and on. Her scenes of sexual escape with Alan Howard are hardly erotic, but they are explicit and strong.
Greenaway has done a number of films. I think a lot of Prospero's Books (1991) and The Draughtsman's Contract (1982). He's a director you have to get in the mood for, though. He doesn't make easy films.
Not for the faint-hearted.........2007-07-18
I saw this film with a group of friends when it first came out. I think we were expecting to see something different. However, the film had a huge impact on me. Never have I been so revolted or fascinated by a film. It is so graphically brutal and so beautifully visualised, it skewers all of our peccadilloes about sex, food and bodily functions but then disarms you with its observations about love and sacrifice. Michael Gambon is in career-best form as the vicious Spica whose treatment of his wife Georgina, a wonderfully understated Helen Mirren, leads her into a dangerous affair with restaurant guest Michael. The chef protects the lovers from Spica's wrath by hiding them in his kitchen where they are surrounded by dead animals and kitchen implements. Death, sex, food and the body are all intimately linked throughout the film - Freud would have been coughing on his pipe-smoke. But even though there is graphic violence and nudity, the effect is not what I would call titillating. Instead, the film is shot as if a theatre piece, or a series of tableaux. The colours are rich and sumptuous and Gaultier's costumes lend an air of decadence. Whether you 'enjoy' the film or not there is no doubting its value as a work of art. And as art, the film is, above all things about what we see, or do not see: the 2 lovers do not even speak to each other for most of the film. We barely need them to, so rich is the visual feast. This film has as much power almost 2 decades later, even in our supposedly more jaded decade. I would recommend this to anyone who has a strong stomach or who has an appreciation of films that are outside the mainstream.
ignore the people who do not like the film, they are plebs!.......2007-06-20
fantastic / British/if punk were a film this would be it. Buy it and watch and keep watching it!
Rancid over-indulgence.......2007-03-02
This film seems to be an excuse for nudity, sex and brutal violence. Fine in their place but the storyline could have been written by a 12-year-old on a napkin. The costumes and scenery are very lavish but it would have benefited more from a good script rather than some fancy togs. This offers little more than Gambon ranting insanely for over an hour, Helen Mirren naked and some people being brutilised, more like a saturday night on the high street really. If this is Greenaway at his finest I think I'll give him a miss in the future.
Amazon.co.uk Review
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is both adored and detested for its combination of sumptuous beauty and revolting decadence. Few directors polarise audiences in the same way as Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker as influenced by Jacobean revenge tragedy and 17th-century painting as by the French New Wave. A vile, gluttonous thief (Michael Gambon) spews hate and abuse at a restaurant run by a stoic French cook (Richard Bohringer), but under the thief's nose his wife (the ever-sensuous Helen Mirren) conducts an affair with a bookish lover (Alan Howard). Clothing (by avant-garde designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) changes colour as the characters move from room to room. Nudity, torture, rotting meat, and Tim Roth at his sleaziest all contribute the atmosphere of decay and excess. Not for everyone, but for some, essential. --Bret Fetzer
Customer Reviews:
Back cover.......2008-02-16
Ace film I cannot recommend it enough but please do not look at the back of this DVD until you've seen it as there is a MAJOR spoiler.
Brutal and grotesque...and a great film.......2007-11-05
This is a movie many people either love or hate; and I like it a lot. It's all style, all color, all rage. A thief (Michael Gambon as Albert Spica) and his wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren) with his toadies and gang members dine each night at the restaurant of the cook (Richard Bohringer). Spica is a monster; crude, loud and a bully with the table manners of a hog. The first scene in the movie is Spica, his gang and their women getting out of their cars in a dark, wet alleyway and preparing to enter the restaurant through the kitchen. But first they deal with a guy who owes Spica money. His gang brings Spica dog excrement on pieces of paper; Spica wipes the stuff all over the other guy's face and mouth. They strip him down while the women watch and Spica continues to smear him. He pokes at the cowering man on the ground with his cane, while others kick at him. Then he urinates on him...but chews out a toadie who was going to do the same because the toadie might offend the women. Spica's behavior doesn't get any better. Georgina Spica wears matyrdom like a cloak. Eating every night in the restaurant is a shy, book-loving man (Alan Howard) who ignores the uproar Albert and his gang create. He and Georgina see each other and he becomes her lover, making love everywhere in the restaurant that they can find where it's quiet, with the help of the cook. The thief finds out and deals with the lover. The wife takes her revenge with the complicity of the cook in a grotesque and appropriate way.
Sounds simple enough, but this movie is a powerhouse. The look of the film, like so much of Greenaway's stuff, is lush and highly stylized. The rooms of the restaurant have their own colors and the costumes of the actors change colors as they move from room to room. The kitchen is huge and strange, with boiling kettles, hanging instruments and tables piled high with glassware and dishes; with geese being plucked in clouds of feathers; with fat, half-naked men stirring steaming sauce pans. A white-haired, retarded boy does simple tasks while singing in a counter-tenor.
The movie, I think, seems to be about anger and retribution. Gambon is a powerful as Albert Spica, completely repellant, domineering and absolutely fascinating. Helen Mirren is superb, and one of the bravest actors around. Her humiliation at the hands of her husband just goes on and on. Her scenes of sexual escape with Alan Howard are hardly erotic, but they are explicit and strong.
Greenaway has done a number of films. I think a lot of Prospero's Books (1991) and The Draughtsman's Contract (1982). He's a director you have to get in the mood for, though. He doesn't make easy films.
Not for the faint-hearted.........2007-07-18
I saw this film with a group of friends when it first came out. I think we were expecting to see something different. However, the film had a huge impact on me. Never have I been so revolted or fascinated by a film. It is so graphically brutal and so beautifully visualised, it skewers all of our peccadilloes about sex, food and bodily functions but then disarms you with its observations about love and sacrifice. Michael Gambon is in career-best form as the vicious Spica whose treatment of his wife Georgina, a wonderfully understated Helen Mirren, leads her into a dangerous affair with restaurant guest Michael. The chef protects the lovers from Spica's wrath by hiding them in his kitchen where they are surrounded by dead animals and kitchen implements. Death, sex, food and the body are all intimately linked throughout the film - Freud would have been coughing on his pipe-smoke. But even though there is graphic violence and nudity, the effect is not what I would call titillating. Instead, the film is shot as if a theatre piece, or a series of tableaux. The colours are rich and sumptuous and Gaultier's costumes lend an air of decadence. Whether you 'enjoy' the film or not there is no doubting its value as a work of art. And as art, the film is, above all things about what we see, or do not see: the 2 lovers do not even speak to each other for most of the film. We barely need them to, so rich is the visual feast. This film has as much power almost 2 decades later, even in our supposedly more jaded decade. I would recommend this to anyone who has a strong stomach or who has an appreciation of films that are outside the mainstream.
ignore the people who do not like the film, they are plebs!.......2007-06-20
fantastic / British/if punk were a film this would be it. Buy it and watch and keep watching it!
Rancid over-indulgence.......2007-03-02
This film seems to be an excuse for nudity, sex and brutal violence. Fine in their place but the storyline could have been written by a 12-year-old on a napkin. The costumes and scenery are very lavish but it would have benefited more from a good script rather than some fancy togs. This offers little more than Gambon ranting insanely for over an hour, Helen Mirren naked and some people being brutilised, more like a saturday night on the high street really. If this is Greenaway at his finest I think I'll give him a miss in the future.
UK DVD:
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