Whether viewed as a darkly funny social allegory, pretentious cinematic masturbation, or a striking tale of lust and revenge, this controversial art-house hit is inarguably one hell of a rough, disturbing ride. Director/writer/painter/novelist Peter Greenaway arrived from the avant-garde school. His layered, cerebral aesthetic should be viewed on numerous levels. This examination of a deadly love triangle--set mostly inside a garish upper class restaurant--is his most conventional movie. Every night inside the same French restaurant, a browbeaten Cook (Richard Bohringer) prepares an extravagant, obscene meal for a boorish Thief (Michael Gambon, frighteningly reprehensible here), his tormented Wife (Hellen Mirren, beautiful amongst the ugliness), and his yes-men crew. While the Thief humiliates everyone at his table, he fails to notice when his Wife begins a torrid affair with a quiet customer (the Lover, Alan Howard) sitting across the restaurant. This nightly game continues until the couple is discovered, setting up numerous acts of unspeakable revenge from both sides.
Though containing a fairly straightforward narrative, Greenaway saturates his study with a haunting Michael Nyman score, photographs it with endless horizontal tracking shots that extend forever, and complicates it with strict color schemes, various painting allusions and by doubling his characters as British class symbols. He also depicts behavior involving defecation, sadism/masochism, explicit sexuality, cruel torture and shame, graphic violence and cannibalism with unflinching glee and rare beauty. This isn't suggesting that such imagery is gratuitous, as Greenaway employs a visceral approach to suggest the desperate mental state of his characters--or pure rage and disgust, if it's to be read as a depiction of the divided state of the British class system under Thatcher. --Dave McCoy
