The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

Beautiful, disgusting, brilliant, profane. Without understatement, this is a rich text that feels as relevant now as it must have almost forty years **** manner of bodily fluids. Sex. Violence. Rotting meat. Naked people pressed against rotting meat. The first in the You May Also Like is Salo: 120 Days of Sodom. While it isn't as graphic as that, it is a film that will disgust **** yet it is one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. The sets, the cinematography, the costumes and costume changes: it feels like slow pans over the paintings of Renaissance masters. The realism and artificialality blend in ecstatic alchemy.Michael Gambon(The Thief /Albert Spica) plays a relentless gangster who imagines he has good taste; I dont think I've seen a character uncomfortably dominate everyone around him except for Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast. Crass, anti intellectual, rapacious and exploitative. He is the ruling class. Evil. Fascism. The Devil. How ever you choose to read it, he wreaks absolute havoc. It fascinates me how aggressive can be in its symbolism while still holding room for so many different readings.Helen Mirin is his abused wife finds love in the arms of a bookish man, who with the help of the chef at the restaurant the thief owns. The context to of this being made in Thatcherite England is no **** all time great score. Everything about this is electrifying. I am adding Peter Greenway to my spectacular British weirdo directors along with Ken Russell, Derek Jarman and Nicholas Roeg. Absolute mad lads, all of them; perhaps Greenway most of all.Strongly, enthusiastically recommend. Tremendous, transgressive and transfixing.

*taken from my letterboxd* A Truly vile and reprehensible film- lauded for its artistic nudity and debauchery, but is not artful in the slightest. Before I get into the main reason I rated this so low, I’ll explain why this isn’t even a good film to begin with. I’m not sure what this film is trying to convey. The film takes no stance whatsoever (other than blatant misogyny) there’s no emotional catharsis to the ending it’s just an incredibly one-dimensional character study (can I even call it that? There’s absolutely nothing interesting about any of these characters). Most of the positive reviews are talking about how colorful it is and… it is. I’m so serious can we start asking for more from movies? “This room was reallllly red so I like this movie, actually!” You’re all so **** easy. The direction is boring. Greenaway never does anything interesting with the camera. In fact, sometimes he barely does anything competent with it. He just point the camera at something and says “feel emotion please”. There was one shot that takes place at a dinner table and it’s a simple shot where he just goes in a circle around the table; hard to mess up, right? Well for about 2/3 of that shot, whoever is talking isn’t even in frame; nor are the person they’re speaking to. There’s no eyeliner to follow they were just talking and the director was pointing the camera at nothing. Also take a shot every time the director just trucks a character going from the restaurant to the kitchen or the kitchen to outside and you’ll be drunk before the 30 minute mark. Now the script is also incredibly lackluster. The premise is kinda interesting. It’s like Gone Girl if Ben Affleck were a mobster (very vague comparison, because I’m tired and can’t think of another movie at the moment) so I was a interested of course. Well from the first scene I was just taken aback at how graphic this was and how insane of a character Spica is. But the script essentially never evolves past that first scene. Every scene (spare a few of course) is just Spica abusing some random person. It got very tiring after only 40 minutes. None of the conversations at the tables were engaging. After a while I just waited until someone pissed off Spica sp he could go beat someone up again. And he did every time. So yeah Bland Direction and boring script. That’s just a 2-2.5 movie to me. For a film to be rated less than 2 it has to actively piss me off or to be corrupt in an inexcusable way and here are those ways:Violence towards women (including ****, physical assault, and emotional assault) is constant, front and center, and never condemned. My initial thoughts while watching these scenes were “how is this filmmaker going to justify beating this woman for almost an hour straight (not exaggerating)? Is he gonna just have the man killed at the end? Is he gonna get equal punishment?” The answer is a blunt no. The man dies at the end but it is swift and painless- it is, thankfully, at the hands of the victim, but is in no way cathartic. This man is EVIL I cannot stress that enough. I cannot stress how far down in hell he deserves to be. And all the pain he is dealt in this film is a quick bullet to the head. The man: smears **** on a man, pisses on him, and beats him, he **** and assaults his wife regularly and uninhibited, he berates and assaults random guests and workers at his restaurant one of- which is a woman whom he stabs in the cheek with a fork. He berates and assaults a child only before force-feeding him buttons from his own clothes, and then derobing and sexually assaulting the child and leaving him unconscious in the hospital, he also force feeds pages from a book to a man causing him to suffocate on his own blood. After the 80 minute mark I realized that this film had dug itself into a whole too far deep. I realized that never in my eyes could any of this be “justified”. I thought maybe there might be an extremely long take of this man being tortured before he was murdered. No, he is simply shot in the head. It’s insane to me that the director could end the film this way. Put every single innocent person through hell and back only for the most vile creature of them all to be dealt with in less than a second.