The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
Directed by Peter Greenaway
When churlish mobster Albert Spica acquires an upscale French restaurant in London, he dines there nightly, effectively scaring off the clientele with his bad manners. His wife, Georgina, is especially disgusted by him, and soon begins an affair with regular guest Michael. Despite their best efforts to keep it secret, Spica learns about their trysts, and he plots a terrible revenge.
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What critics say influenced The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
Among his few acknowledged influences are avant-garde precisionist Hollis Frampton and French New Wave puzzlemaker Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad), whose brilliant cinematographer, Sacha Vierny, he has adopted as his own.
An artist like David Lynch, director of "Blue Velvet," violates taboos, but not simply for shock effect.
With a dungeon-like kitchen that looks like it was snatched out of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, this is a fantastically bizarre place to eat dinner.
Sordid sexual arrangements generally cause these catastrophes, as in The Draughtsman's Contract (April 11) and his new Pillow Book--although the latter seems the warmest and least fussy of Greenaway's films, and a rebuttal of his stated belief that it's "very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself."
Greenaway is not ordinarily such a visceral director, and indeed his earlier films (" The Draughtsman's Contract ," "A Zed and Two Noughts," "The Belly of an Architect") have specialized in cerebral detachment.
This is a dark, grim, and depressing morality play by British writer-director Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman's Contract).