[In the following review, Grant argues that the elements of political allegory in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover cannot adequately emerge because of the film's highly stylized form.]

Although it seems unusual, and highly pretentious, to call vulgarity “aesthetic,” the brand of vulgarity practiced in this masterfully overdone work [The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover] from director Peter Greenaway is just that. Which is not to say that it's pretty, or to attempt to excuse the film's clever cruelties with an academic appraisal. It's simply that, in the insular, hyper-stylized world that Greenaway fashions, the distasteful acts performed by Albert Spica (“the Thief,” played by Michael Gambon) seem like a natural part of the scenery.

For the film, like Greenaway's other features, appears at a casual glance to operate solely on a visual level, offering a carefully structured view of a totally artificial space; what goes on to occur in that space, though, is always a function of an intellectual system. In other words, the organs the film seems aimed at are the eyes and the stomach (the body part that Greenaway obsessively analyzed in Belly of an Architect); once one begins to decipher the narrative, however, it becomes clear that Greenaway wishes to affect his viewers' minds as well.

The plotline is so minimalist it's almost misleading: Spica and his entourage dine nightly at a restaurant that he has bought into. A pure bred philistine, he beats the employees if he doesn't like a meal, and eats like a slob when he does. He can basically do anything that he wants to, as he controls everything that goes in the restaurant and its periphery. Well, just about everything; what he doesn't recognize is that his wife carries on each evening with an introverted bookshop owner in a closeted area of the kitchen.

The strikingly colored restaurant, where nearly all the film's action takes place, is a space where all corporal acts are equal: eating has just the same degree of brutal intensity as does sex, torture, defecation, and the last bodily function of all, death. Greenaway chooses to populate this space with a number of broadly drawn characters, with the titular quartet occupying the focus.

Much has been made of the film's symbolic level, due to the fact that the film's characters clearly emerge as archetypes, and Greenaway has stated in interviews that the film's evident vulgarity is intended as a reaction against the Thatcher government and its morally repressive leanings. Some clearly readable symbols do exist: the “lover” character, for instance, is a stick figure, who seems to represent the overly silent (he doesn't speak for a good portion of the film) academic element in society, individuals who arm themselves with knowledge, and know all too well the lessons history has to offer (the lover's main interest being the French Revolution). The other three lead characters all have easily definable personas, but what they may actually signify is less readily apparent. For instance, Spica could either be seen as a stand-in for all cruel employers, or the upper classes who live off the work of the common people, or a despotic ruler who acts swiftly and without remorse (presumably the Thatcher connection), or he could simply be the dark side of the underclass, a greedy cockney hood gone big time. In short, if Greenaway did intend The Cook, the Thief, … to have political overtones, his overriding desire to create an ornate work of art has rendered the allegory nearly indecipherable. Which could, in fact, have been what Greenaway wanted all along—a primal parable meant to shock those lulled into acquiescence by morally repressive leaders.

Enigmatic symbols aside, what does remain in the forefront is the strong work done by three of the leads (the role of the lover proving thankless for Alan Howard). Helen Mirren exhibits a ripe sexuality as the wife, a perennial victim of her husband's contempt, a woman whose only liberation is found in sex (not exactly a role British actresses “of a certain age” would flock to). Bohringer skillfully underplays the role of the cook, the only individual who refuses to buckle under to Spica's every whim; he not only demands sovereignty in the kitchen, but he also helps to arrange the interludes between the wife and her lover. The film's longest sequence, a kitchen conversation between the cook and the wife, reveals Bohringer's understated command of his character. At the other end of things, Michael Gambon (best known on these shores for his starring performance in the exquisite Singing Detective) goes all out as Spica, overacting to the nth degree and delivering an outrageously broad performance that alternately arouses total disgust and terrific amusement.

Despite the admirable work done by the cast, this is a director's film that boasts a wholly original look, which dominates over everything else, including message and characterization. Greenaway and director of photography Sacha Vierny (a veteran of seven Resnais films, Belle Du Jour, and Greenaway's last three features) have gone so far as to color-code the various spaces in which the action takes place, thus not only altering the ambience from scene to scene, but making the characters' garish clothing look different from shot to shot—the bizarre fashions, incidentally, the product of Jean-Paul Gaultier's imagination (the same Gaultier who styled the “torpedo” look for Madonna's current concert tour). This jarring colorization of the sets could be scrutinized for hidden meaning—the press notes speak of the restaurant's red as “symbolizing danger” and the kitchen's green implying “safety”—but primarily, the device is an aesthetic one, calculated to trigger certain emotional responses.

The same reactions are solicited by Greenaway's usual visual trademarks: symmetically composed images that find the characters dwarfed by the architecture surrounding them; other compositions that “trap” the characters within windows, mirrors, or bars; and selective camera movements, such as the 360° pan used here to slowly circle Spica's table, revealing that his wife has scurried off while he, and we, weren't watching.

The film's visual style is so geometrically precise and chromatically bizarre that the viewer winds up distanced from the action. What obliterates this distance is the immediacy of the film's most noted element, the very carnal and often physically brutal acts committed by the characters. Greenaway's rampant aestheticism transforms all it touches, flattering the rather fleshy, middle-aged union of the wife and her lover, while underscoring a strategy he has employed before: the introduction unto an utterly idyllic environment of one nightmarish element. The rot and decay that intruded in the pristine settings of his Zed and Two Noughts are incarnated here by Spica. The kind to kick a man while he's down (and utilize dog excrement for some added humiliation), Spica is an irredeemable bully, a tyrant who likes to harm beauteous individuals (his wife, the small child who sings arias in the restaurant's grand kitchen) and resents the lover's knowledge as much as his dallying with his wife.

And as if Spica's actions weren't enough, Greenaway has decay lurking right outside the restaurant in the form of two truckfuls of rotting meat that no one gets around to unloading. These ugly elements fit quite neatly into Greenaway's design for the film, providing the fly in the ointment, the horrific a natural corollary to the beautiful. The message he's trying to impart may be muddled, but the visceral level on which the film affects its audience makes it a unique work, with one added bonus. Because of its innovative nastiness, it has attracted a broadbased audience and a wider release. It seems that, just as was the case with Blue Velvet, Le Grande Bouffe, et al., The Cook, the Thief … acquires as many viewers looking to see a “gross-out movie” as it does serious art house aficionados hoping to solve the enigmas of Greenaway's anti-Thatcherist act of provocation.