I don't know if I need to discuss the politics at the heart of the film or not, so I will address them really quickly at the start and then move on to a purely aesthetic analyses of the film. The movie can easily be looked at as a reaction to Thatcherism and the consumer culture created under her conservative regime. The political allegory isn't even thinly veiled and Greenaway doesn't shy away from showing what he thinks of the key players (there is literal "cannibalism" in the film). The movie isn't just about Thatcherism (or Reaganism or any other "ism"s for that matter), it works as an critique of western values and us as people in general; we only…

"What you've got to realize is that the clever cook puts unlikely things together, like duck and orange, like pineapple and ham. It's called 'artistry'. You know, I am an artist the way I combine my business and my pleasure: Money's my business, eating's my pleasure and Georgie's my pleasure, too, though in a more private kind of way than stuffing the mouth and feeding the sewers, though the pleasures are related because the naughty bits and the dirty bits are so close together that it just goes to show how eating and sex are related. Georgie's naughty bits are nicely related, aren't they, Georgie?"

Five notions come to mind, almost immediately, when I begin to think about The Cook,…

***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

As any brilliant avant-garde film, Peter Greenaway's absolute masterpiece is an attack to the senses. This attack, however, has the sensual danger of awakening the most primitive instincts of the human being. It has always been interesting to notice Greenaway's past focus on architectonic stillness and provocative imagery with symbolic representations. This film is no exception. Conglomerating bizarre elements and a literally unbeatable sense of humor that abounds in cleverness and intellectualism, this groundbreaking story has obviously received a mixed balance of positive and negative reviews. For those who can grab a book and read between lines, for those who appreciate Ernest Hemingway and Wim Wenders, for those who have…

I was not prepared for this hyper-stylized satirical tour de force of food, sex, artistry, and excrement.

"Now, you behave yourself in the future and pay for what I ask you or next time I'm gonna make you eat your own shit."

There were so many times when this poster on Letterboxd of Helen Mirren looking sexy caught my attention, along with that long obscure title. Right from the start the intense avant-garde style of my first Peter Greenaway film caught me off guard, and I would not recommend going into it blind.

Similar to a film like 'Dogville', you can tell 'The Cook, the Theif, His Wife & Her Lover is taking place on a set and has the feel…

"What you've got to realize is that the clever cook puts unlikely things together, like duck and orange, like pineapple and ham. It's called 'artistry'."

HOLY SHIT.

That seems an apt response to a film so concerned with matters both divine and faecal. From the start, Peter Greenaway hits us with constant references to bodily waste, and yet shoots it all with an astoundingly beautiful formalism. He presents a series of binaries: sex and death, order and mess, food and shit. In each case, you can't have one without the other. I'd call it a gruelling watch, but gruel isn't to be found at Le Hollandais. Instead, we are tortured by richness.

Michael Gambon, looking like an English Tony Soprano,…