If you can't stand the heat, then get out of the kitchen, because director Peter Greenaway's food porn movie is one film that is really hard to digest. It's not for everybody. After all, the film's putrescence, debasement and excesses (sadism, cannibalism, torture, graphic fornication, puke, and rotting fish and meat) and scatological themes (force-feeding of excrement, urination on victims) forced the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) to give the film, an "X" rating for theaters, and a NC-17 rating by the time of its video release. An alternative R-rated version was indeed made, but it cut out about 30 minutes of footage. Regardless of what version, you try to watch; all of them, ends the same way, with your head over a brown bag, puking. It's just one of those types of a movie even if the nudity scenes are not that bad. Without spoiling the film, too much, the story also written by Greenaway was inspired by Jacobean revenge tragedies and name after four people that the director originally wanted to work with; it tells the story of a successful criminal, Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) with expensive tastes having just bought a French restaurant, where he holds court nightly drinking the finest wines and abusing staff and customers equally, while his mistreated wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren), secretly has an affair with a bookseller, Michael (Alan Howard). However, things become more troublesome for the secret lovers as Albert find out about their affair, setting off a chain of violent acts over the course of one night dinner party, which the main cook, Richard Boarst (Richard Bohringer) cannot stop. While, this film is not as shocking or offensive as other films like this, such as 1975's 'Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom' or 2010's 'A Serbian Film'; 1989's 'The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover' did do something, besides having shock value. It was also somewhat beautiful metaphoric shot by cinematographer, Sacha Vierny. I love how Peter Greenaway and his crew designed this cruel, over-the-top, truth-telling film as an allegorical criticism of wasteful and barbaric upper-class consuming society in Western civilization (specifically Thatcherism and Reaganism of the 1980s). You do kinda see it, with the way, the cameraman shots people eating beautiful baroque style artwork of food, with their eating habits representing more like pigs feeding at a through, than proper dining etiquette. Its looks rather gross. Even the graphic sex scenes, while somewhat hot, are just as dirty. After all, porking near raw dead animals filmed with unflattering lighting isn't what I call, 'attractive'. Despite that, I love how huge and allegorical, this colorful restaurant is. It is a bizarre place, a mixer of post-modern pipes and medieval-looking cauldrons. Almost like a dream, of some sort. It's portray a sense of luxury and commodity to the point that it can be seen as a symbolism of Frans Hals style art, with the cook representing the artist, the theft as the forger, the wife as the populace and the lover as the intelligent circle. I also love how the kitchen and storage area (deep jungle-green), representing greed & decay, main dining room (hellish red), signifying blood & violence, the adjacent parking lot (dark blue) representing the coldness & death, and the restrooms (white) representing neutrality, and exactitude. It made a wonderful centerpiece for a Technicolor stage play with the costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier changing colors like a mood ring. You really do see the characters, reaction differently, with each location. The acting throughout this, is amazing, even if some of them, like Michael Gambon was a bit, hammy and Richard Bohringer, a bit limiting. They all have a part to play, here. While, some scenes in this movie can seem out of place and not needed like the singing dishwasher kid, Pup (Paul Russell), the spoon waiter, and the shirtless cook scenes that comes off as too bizarre and pretentious. For the most part, the pacing is alright, despite a few filler and padding. Another thing, great about this movie is the music, by composter, Michael Nyman. It's beautiful, stately, & elegiac, even if it's mostly a recopy of his 1985's 'Memorial' funeral piece. It remind me, so much of 17th century English composter, Henry Purcell in the way, it adds immeasurable depth of feeling. Overall: Although, it's not easy to sit through this surreal, somewhat avant garde film. It's also impossible to turn away from the screen. It's like a beautiful train wreck. You hate to see it, but can't help, yourself for taking a look. I can only recommended it, for people that had morbid curiosity about certain people's inhumanity. There is no fine dining here.

Another art film, another two hours of my life wasted...The only "good" thing in this vile pile of crap is the nudity of a 40- something actress....besides that, there is nothing else in this waste of celluloid that has any intrinsic value.The acting is painful, the constant yelling of the "Thief" is migraine- inducing, the music is irritating, the depiction of food is nauseating and, oh boy, the film is talky, too talky...The violence is on par with Z-grade torture-porn film.But, hey, "artists", the artsy-fartsy pedant crowds see this heap of steaming manure as some sort of allegory, a metaphor for God knows what. Be warned that watching it will cause a massive destruction of neurons in your brain.

There is a Cook, whose restaurant has been taken over by the Thief. The setting is transformed by Greenaway into a character itself, and divided chiefly into three segments, and strongly colour coded. We begin in a vast and cavernous kitchen, where the green glow and a soprano boy singing hymns whilst chopping vegetables shows how sacred this area is to Richard, the head cook. Then we dolly sideways through the wall, and the music changes into something more classical, and we enter dining area itself, which is rich and ornate in its décor, but has been invaded by Albert, a British gangster. The richness and warmth takes on an entirely different colour because of his ownership of the establishment. His Wife Georgina takes solace in the bathroom, which is pure white and spotless - in the men's room, the urinals are arranged on some sort of podium, elegant in its composition, but which Albert also desecrates. She hastily shuts the door to prevent a sliver of harsh red light emanating from outside, that seeks to expose her infidelity, and changes clothing and persona so effortlessly in masking her secret affair. Spica is less concerned with this and more with the status of his restaurant, which is towering (watch as Spica enters from the factory-like kitchen, pushing open the immense double doors, and walking out from a column of smoke), and headed by a talented chef, but his class betrays him - he purchases cheap cutlery and descends to thuggish behaviour.Albert Spica is not an entirely despicable character, and this is what makes him interesting. Gambon's performance is dominant, bullying and harsh, but he is not crass - he has led himself to believe that if he owns and dines at a high class restaurant each night, and familiarises himself with its fine and exotic cuisine, that he is better than his breed of gangster. He berates his subordinates for invading this space, for smoking, for having dirty fingernails, for not washing their hands, but is not aware that he is the most toxic presence of them all; a lingering on the silent table as he wanders off to terrorise yet another customer is telling. And yet, he does have his moments of sincerity, and these are sparing, but genuine. He tosses a coin to the same boy he will later torture, and when his drunkenness does not lead to violence and debauchery, he cracks and weeps briefly on the breakdown of his marriage, and his desire for kids and a family, and there is a tiny hint of a better relationship long lost in the past, under the pier. It is disappointing that I am much more convinced by the villain than those that seek to undermine him. The man who bullies and jeers at a more cultured specimen that stole away his wife is more interesting than the cultured man himself. Albert wants to be cultured and refined, but does not want to put the hard yards into it, and such an arduous task like reading is infinitely more difficult than purchasing an entire restaurant. So he bullies, and stuff pages detailing the French Revolution down a man's throat instead of slitting wrists or pulling out teeth. The lovers don't speak a word to each other for quite some time, but we see their urgent passion and escape in the white bathroom and the green tinged kitchen storage, while their naked bodies are bathed in a orange glow, something more intimate. But it is not wholly convincing. I think the most powerful scene should have been the quiet talk on the kitchen island, where the lost love between the Wife and her Lover emanate through her grieving words, and empower her desire for revenge, but is is empty, and vastly overpowered by the final act itself, because it is so disgusting what Spica endures, even as he deserves it tenfold. Another scene illustrates this drawback; the lover's naked embrace soiled by the swinging cuts and carcasses of meat in the chaos of the truck. Then again, the alternative is them lavishing in the meat, which is equally disgusting. Of course, there is much debate about looking past the literal story, and talk of the film criticising Thatcherism. I'm sure there is merit to those if you look closely enough, but I did not think about it much while watching. The cook and his staff, who are supposed to represent the dutiful citizen, the trampled people of the nation, has his own sort of underhanded revenge, where he charges more for food of blackness and death, of vanity in diets, of lustful aphrodisiacs, as if he is sneering and punishing at the decadence of the rich and privileged, but this feels more like a political jab than anything a cook would actually say. Oh, the dialogue is witty and cruel all right; Georgina taunts Albert about knowing where her lover's prick has been, right before shooting him in the head. Misery is heaped upon misery, and it doesn't feel much like anyone has won.

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.