[In the following mixed review of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, Jenkins argues that the character of the “Thief” is neither believable nor original.]

“The naughty bits and the dirty bits are very close together,” blurts Albert Spica, the villain of this piece, a few minutes into it; and thereafter we are seldom allowed to forget how much eating owes to death and sex to food, and how all flesh bears the taint of corruption.

Peter Greenaway's rich, dark fantasy, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, opens with the despicable Spica, a gangster of sorts, forcing someone literally to eat shit; and for the rest of the film that is what, metaphorically, he does to one and all. We are what we eat, we turn everything we eat to shit, Spica (and by implication his late-capitalist yob-code of nouveau-riche vulgarity and conspicuous consumption, seasoned here with a little sadistic violence and some megalomaniac touches) turns everything to shit anyway. Not strikingly original ideas, but, given a vision sufficiently focused or a script sufficiently compelling, capable, you'd think, of putting a few off their next confit de canard. Greenaway delivers the first; but sabotages his film with his arrogant disregard of the second.

The story, such as it is, is one of impetuous passion and revenge. Spica's brutalized wife (a flinching, bruised but erotically undiminished Helen Mirren) finds fulfilment in the arms of a refined and gentle bookseller (Alan Howard), in a variety of darkish kitchen-corners of the vast, vaguely futuristic and sumptuous restaurant that Spica owns, and that provides the setting for his ludicrous demonstrations of omnipotence (though, it is predictably hinted, he is in fact impotent). The lover pays a grim price for their sexual happiness, but the sympathetic and much put-upon cook and the wife exact an even more gruesome revenge from the thief. All this matters hardly at all; what matters is the sequence of tableaux vivants and natures mortes that substitutes for the “action.” These owe everything—as the name of the restaurant, Le Hollandais, reminds us, along with the huge genre-painting that dominates the scene—to Dutch seventeenth-century precedents. Le Hollandais is decorated in the colours of meat, blood and death; its clientele's Gaultier-designed garb changes hue as the wearers move between kitchen, dining-room and lavatory; and the behaviour of the proprietor runs to excesses undreamt of even by the late Peter Langan. It is, in short, a rum place; the air of irreality deepens with every diner we watch, aghast, sitting down to eat there. It works better as metaphor (the world as charnel-house; in the midst of life we are in death), but carnal appetite and decay are equally distanced by the stylized beauty of the set-pieces.

Much has been made—with little discouragement from the writer-director—of this film's “Jacobean” lineage. Spica—a performance of outrageous theatricality and sublime unconvincingness from Michael Gambon—has his roots, certainly, in a line of frightening caricatures from Tamburlaine to Ubu Roi; he has one or two fiendish moments (the bookseller is suffocated with pages from his favourite book, Carlyle's French Revolution—social change rammed down his throat as he is made to eat his words) but more often treads a line between buffoonery and bathos. He isn't frightening, because we don't believe in his insane possessiveness, his ability to consume the world with evil; we don't believe in these things because he is given nothing to say that would make us believe them. Greenaway's other characters are, in fact, mere burping clothes-horses. Lurching eerily from a thinly dramatized cry of disgust and rage (though whether a vegetarian's, a moralist's or a snob's is never as clear as you'd wish) to a self-cherishing banquet for the eyes, stuffed with visual rhymes, puns and teases, the film seems finally as opulent, wasteful, cruel and empty as the ethos it confusedly strives to stigmatize.