Peter Greenaway - The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)

Posted By: FNB47

Date: March 23, 2007

Peter Greenaway - The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
| 1418.9 MB | Runtime 1:59:09 | color |
Language : English
Optional subtitles : English / Turkish
Audio Track-1 : AC3, 48000 Hz, 192 Kb/s, 2-ch (English dub.)
Audio Track-2 : mp3, 48000 Hz, 104 Kb/s, 2-ch (Spanish dub.)
Audio Track-3 : mp3, 48000 Hz, 105 Kb/s, 2-ch (Italian dub.)
Audio Track-4 : mp3, 48000 Hz, 119 Kb/s, 2-ch (German dub.)
Video : XviD, 1100 Kb/s, 25 frm/s, 672x288 (2.35:1)

At Le Hollandais gourmet restaurant, every night is filled with opulence, decadence and gluttony. But when the cook (Richard Bohringer), a thief (Michael Gambon), his wife (Helen Mirren) and her lover (Alan Howard) all come together, they unleash a shocking torrent of sex, food, murder, and revenge. (-DVD cover)

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover has been called everything from savage political satire to daring pornography, yet critics worldwide agree on one thing: In this courageous and challenging classic writer/director Peter Greenaway has created nothing less than a cinematic feast for the senses. (-DVD cover)

The wife of a barbaric crime boss engages in a secretive romance with a gentle bookseller between meals at her husband's restaurant. Food, colour coding, sex, murder, torture and cannibalism are the exotic fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern fable which has been interpreted as an allegory for Thatcherism. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0097108/plotsummary)

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) spews hate and abuse at a restaurant run by a stoic French cook (Richard Bohringer), but under the thief's nose his wife (Helen Mirren) conducts an affair with a bookish lover (Alan Howard). 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 at his sleaziest all contribute the atmosphere of decay and excess. Not for everyone, but for some, essential. (www.amazon.com)

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. (www.amazon.com)

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. (www.amazon.com)

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. (www.amazon.com)

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