Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107962 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-03-13
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Colour, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 124 minutes

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

Disgusting, entriguing and utterly, utterly mad...
You'll either love or hate this film. It is both utterly grotesque and beautifully amusing. Gambon is masterful and dominates throughout, as his character is wont to do. As this is very much an abstract film (Being set around a single elaborate restaurant) where the colour of the character's clothes is dependent upon which room they're in, the characters are also very abstract. The characters, bar Gambon and Tim Roth and his cronies, tend to be rather static, not moving much, and the lovemaking is slow and tender.

It is a fascinating picture, and definately not one you would want to watch with your grandparents. Watch it if you so desire, but be very wary for what may be in store for you.

Back cover
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
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.