Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37309 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-03-13
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Color, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 124 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Few directors polarize audiences like Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker as influenced by Jacobean revenge tragedy and 17th century painting as by the French New Wave. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is both adored and detested for its combination of sumptuous beauty and revolting decadence. A vile, gluttonous thief (Michael Gambon, The Singing Detective) spews hate and abuse at a restaurant run by a stoic French cook (Richard Bohringer, Diva), but under the thief's nose his wife (the ever-sensuous Helen Mirren, Prime Suspect) conducts an affair with a bookish lover (Alan Howard, Strapless). Clothing (by avant-garde designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) changes color as the characters move from room to room. Nudity, torture, rotting meat, and Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs) at his sleaziest all contribute the atmosphere of decay and excess. Not for everyone, but for some, essential. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
A movie about a crude British thug, Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), whose favorite method of terrorizing people is ramming things down their throats. Albert himself eats only haute cuisine; he and his wife (Helen Mirren) dine every night at a posh restaurant called Le Hollandais. This is an Art Movie, refined and terribly formal; the director, Peter Greenaway (who also wrote the script), places this barbarian smack in the middle of "painterly" compositions and encourages us to see him as a steaming hunk of offal desecrating the beauty of an artist's creation. He looks at Albert with the disdainful stare that the pukka sahib directs at a servant who has inconvenienced him. Greenaway, however, has a lot more in common with his loutish protagonist than he thinks. He obviously regards himself as an aesthetic virtuoso, but he's just a cultural omnivore. (He chews with his mouth open-we can identify almost every piece of art that has fed his imagination.) The only thing in this movie's tidy, hermetic universe that Greenaway is unable to control, or disguise with fancy brushwork, is his loathing of the body. The movie features several gross-out scenes, including a climactic act of cannibalism; the Motion Picture Association of America gave it an X rating. (The distributors released it unrated.) What's offensive about the picture, though, isn't its violence or its visceral shocks but the patrician arrogance, the smug aestheticism, the snobbishness that suffuse every frame. Greenaway is an intellectual bully: he pushes us to the ground and kicks art in our faces. Also with Alan Howard (the Lover) and Richard Bohringer (the Cook). Cinematography by Sacha Vierny. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

More repulsive than an old John Waters movie.
John Waters made movies that were so disgusting, they were funny- hilarious even. JW's movies were like a teenager trying to be as revolting as possible just to be funny. They were just awful- and awful-ly humorous. Yet there was no pretense of being "high art." John Waters knew he was crowning himself the queen of trash cinema.

This movie is not by John Waters. It's got all the disgusting violence and sexuality of "Desperate Living," but with a nauseating dose of pretense. The movie actually seems to think it's classy for some reason. It's because of the film's arrogance, the fact that this movie wants so desperately to be high art, that it fails.

It does look polished. It looks sumptuous. It's dazzling. Then you realize what's actually going on is so nasty it makes all the visual beauty worthless. It's kind of like a painting by H.R. Giger. At first it looks rich and full of depth, but when you actually focus in on it, you realize it's a painting of a jumbled pile of corpses (with some kind of monster mixed in for good measure).

...or maybe that's a bad analogy. I'll speak plainly.

It looks great (I've established that already). Pretty much every other aspect of the movie is either disappointing or off-putting. There's terrible violence (in some ways worse than many famous horror movies) and the whole thing reeks of pretense.

This is the perfect movie for anyone who wants to look artsy, deep, sophisticated, intellectual-- in the eyes of those who know nothing of art, depth, sophistication or intellect.

A true masterpiece, but...
...not for the squeamish and certainly not for every taste. Made back before Helen Mirren and Sir Michael Gambon became "big", this film can be viewed on many levels. It's a work of art resonating with a powerful musical score, haunting imagery, black comedy and heavy symbolism. You'll not likely see this combination again. If you have a region-free player, amazon.co.uk. has it for less than ten bucks.

intriguing.. but brace yourself.. or laugh a little.
very well-done film. you may have to suspend disbelief once or twice. in a few small places, reads like a play.

it takes a bit of nerve to for the director to bring (and us, to watch) our naked heros going from a love affair in the restaurant kitchen, to the kitchen freezer while the husband is searching afore mentioned kitchen (they are still completely naked while in the freezer), and from there, are hustled off into the back of a truck full of rotting meat (still naked) which is their escape vehicle.

there are some scenes in this movie that seem to inspire vegetarianism.

always with the motif of the repulsive going side by side with the delicacy of the gourmet's favorite activity - eating. i applaud this director for his frank take on the repulsive aspect of eating. the van of rotting meat, slain animals always in view, the dogs outside the restaurant, and the villainous husband with his pseudo-gourmet appreciation of the fine french restaurant. and at the same time, likening the corrupt ways of the husband/mafia character to one who preys on others; in the end, he is forced into the literal enactment of what his life, in essence, has been.