[In the following review, French offers a positive assessment of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, complimenting the film's visual style.]

Eating is a constant theme in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. More oddly, as Donald Spoto observed in his biography, lavatories recur to a quite obsessive degree throughout his oeuvre. During his conversations with François Truffaut, Hitchcock, the greatest of cinematic gourmets, spoke of an ambition to make a film that would portray the life of a city through its food. It would show the raw ingredients being transported into the city, their preparation and consumption, and would then conclude in the sewers.

In The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (Palace), Peter Greenaway has come close to fulfilling Hitchcock's ambition. In fact, he has taken it further, portraying the whole of life in terms of consumption and excretion. Greenaway himself has described the film as ‘a violent and erotic love-story set in the kitchen and dining-room of a smart restaurant.’ But this omits one crucial locale, the restaurant lavatory. In characteristically unflinching style, Greenaway views his subject in its totality. Food is consumed and excreted; some ingredients are lovingly and artfully prepared and cooked, others are allowed to rot.

If Drowning by Numbers was a film of the exterior world, shot entirely on location, the new film is a closeted, deliberately studio-bound work, shot entirely in and around one sound stage at Elstree. The film's restaurant is a domain of civilised pleasure, but it is also a Sadean refuge where force rules and everything is permitted: anything can be cooked and there is nothing that cannot be consumed in one way or another.

As in all Greenaway's films, the basic plot is straightforward. Each night the gross, violent villain, Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), comes to dine at the elegant restaurant, La Hollandaise. Permanently in tow are his downtrodden wife Georgina (Helen Mirren) and different members of his gang, played by such actors as Tim Roth and Ian Drury. Albert indulges in what is virtually a monologue, brutal and scatological, in which he insults and abuses all around him. His most delicate, edgy relationship is with the chef of La Hollandaise, played by the French actor Richard Bohringer (most familiar in Britain, perhaps, from Diva).

Georgina catches the eye of another of the regular patrons, Michael (Alan Howard), who sits silently reading at his table. They begin a passionate sexual affair which takes place, until the end, entirely within the precincts of the restaurant. This affair consists of virtually nothing but a series of couplings, first in a cubicle of the ladies' lavatory, then in the kitchen and the restaurant's ample storerooms. Finally, on the verge of discovery, they flee naked into the cold-store and escape in a truck full of rotting meat.

The proceedings are dominated, presided over, by Michael Gambon, who unites the film's two sides, part gangster movie, part revenge tragedy. Spica is a spray-cartoon of a gangster. He is like a big psychopathic child, smearing one of his victims with dog shit in the opening sequence, gleefully outdoing a long line of misogynist gangsters by pushing a fork into the cheek of a girl. He's also a theatrical Jacobean villain, with the gang as his depraved courtiers and the curtained dining-room as the stage where he finally receives his deserts.

The other three actors all stand in contrast to Gambon's towering central presence. Where he is coarse, Helen Mirren is painfully vulnerable. Where he is verbose and fluent, Richard Bohringer is restrained, not least by his thick French accent. And where he is loud, Alan Howard, one of the most self-effacing of actors, is virtually silent, speaking his first words halfway through the picture, and then almost in a whisper.

It's a fascinating story, but as with the earlier films, I'm not entirely convinced by the script. Greenaway's titles are more brilliant than those of any other filmmaker. (They are also a problem for the reviewer since they are so long, and so difficult to shorten. Belly? Zed? Cook?) But the language in the films rarely lives up to them, or to the dazzling visual imagery they accompany. I wish Greenaway had found a co-writer to lend more interest to Michael Gambon's rants, more lyricism to the film's moments of love and revenge, more substance to the pivotal role of the Cook.

These shortcomings, though, are made up for by the visual style which embodies the film's true narrative. Greenaway is often seen as a director intoxicated with ideas, but his true obsession is the failure of ideas when they run up against the stubborn tyranny of the real world. His idealists are constantly thwarted: by power in The Draughtsman's Contract; by physical decay in A Zed and Two Noughts; by illness in The Belly of an Architect.

As with Greenaway's earlier films, Cook features a good deal of nudity, but the naked bodies are viewed in a strangely detached style. For a story about appetite, this is a startlingly unerotic film. Mirren and Howard lie together among the meat and poultry and their bodies come to seem like fleshy constraints, emblems of their possessors' failure to achieve transcendence.

The production design, by Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs (also responsible for Zed and Two Noughts and Drowning by Numbers), is magnificent and there are moments in their collaboration with the photographer Sacha Vierny when the film touches greatness. Each area of action, the kitchen, the dining-room and the lavatory, has a different design and colour scheme, and the actors' extravagant Jean-Paul Gaultier costumes change colour as they move between them. The different rooms also seem to represent different stages of history, an architectural mockery of human progress. The kitchen with its still lives and its fowl being dismembered is eighteenth century, the dining-room with its lush fabrics nineteenth century and the hi-tech bathroom late twentieth.

Greenaway's last three films, made with the help and boldness of his Dutch producers, are among the most original visual experiments since Powell and Pressburger's great years. With increasing resources and skill, Greenaway has taken old forms—the murder story, the thriller—dismantled them and put them back together to make something entirely new. It's a perilous project and filmgoers must keep their fingers crossed. British visionaries have a way of going terribly wrong, witness the course of Nicolas Roeg's career. But Greenaway is now beyond question the most exciting intelligence at work in our cinema.