The Thief is co-owner of a sophisticated French eatery. His partner, The Cook, loathes The Thief for his short temper and boorish manners, but would rather bite his tongue and seethe than risk The Thief's wrath. The Thief is also abusive and possessive of his beautiful Wife, who sees a local bookowner one night at the restaurant, makes a connection with him, and begins an affair.

That is basically the setup for the film. While these characters DO have names and the drama and psychology of the film more or less exists on a human spectrum, the director Peter Greenaway throws in a number of distancing techniques. Most famous is changing the clothing of The Wife and Her Lover once they enter a bathroom or lobby, so that they will match the color scheme of the room. The film is constantly beautiful to look at. A painter by training, Greenaway fills the screen with sexy blues, reds and whites, aestheticizing and abstracting the action within the frame. The film is filled with freak characters; most notable perhaps is an androgynous singing boy made up to look like an angel from the Romanticist period. When Greenaway needs to put some dogs in the film, he uses Dalmatians! Like a painter, Greenaway uses these elements for effect and for texture, and doesn't disregard as much as out-and-out embrace the feeling of fussed-over artifice that they produce.

The fourth wall isn't formally broken, but it's cracked a little. When asked why he doesn't talk much, The Lover says that he saw a movie where the hero did not speak until a third of the way through. While this man was silent, The Lover was transfixed. Once he spoke, he lost all interest. P.T. Anderson played the same gag in Magnolia where he had Philip Seymour Hoffman say to Tom Cruise's handler over the phone, "This is the part of the movie where you help me out.” The characters exhibit this blooming partial consciousness of their existence in the context of a movie. The film is bookended by curtains like Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, again placing a whole other veneer of distance between the film and the audience.

The film has surprisingly few close-up shots. Greenaway generally prefers wide, long, elaborate tracking shots instead. This seems to water down the terrors slightly; Greenaway isn't shy about abusing his subjects but he won't linger over their suffering, he won't get off on it. In a scene where The Thief stabs a moll with a fork, Greenaway tilts up before we can see the wound gush as her boyfriend pulls it out and before we examine her screaming mug. We don't even see the fork going into her face; we see him stab her and then we cut to the wound. One of the more gruesome sequences in the film is the torture and murder of The Lover by The Thief. If you do not know the details already, I will not spoil them for you, but suffice it to say that it is handled in wide to medium shot in a fairly casual manner. While there is a sense in which Greenaway's amoral neutrality better burrows under the skin than a more heated approach, it feels rather sanitized and compromised in light of the complexly simplistic sadism of Takashi Miike, Michael Bay and Marcus Nispel, or especially Mel Gibson. The artiness of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover works as a chastity belt protecting both Greenaway and the audience against any genuinely violent penetration.

Lars Von Trier's Dogville was stylized and abstract in a somewhat similar way, but it was also intentionally artless. The artiness was boiled all out, so that the venom may be even more potent. The artiness is omnipresent in The Cook, The Thief His Wife & Her Lover and can easily be divorced from the content of the film. We are allowed to attach ourselves to Greenaway's distancing devices, to discuss the film's sociological and philosophical content, and we never have to confront the porny attraction of violence. We can all assure ourselves that the images that we are seeing exist to make a specific point and not to titillate. Audiences will not be implicated in the violence; it is, after all, in the name of art.

Now there does seem to be a point to the artifice and the gruesome images; it's just that there being a point is, in itself, a defensive technique. The artifice of the picture suggests that it is meant to be taken as an allegory, that these characters represent something other than themselves, a notion confirmed once and for all by the nature of the title: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. The popular reading, as summarized by Roger Ebert, is that The Cook represents dutiful civil servants, The Thief is Margaret Thatcher's arrogance and support of the greedy, The Wife is Britannia, and The Lover is ineffectual opposition from the left.

Even under this reading, the film has a bit of a classist edge. The Lover is never quite properly indicted by Greenaway and dies a bit of a martyr's death. The Lover is indeed "ineffectual opposition from the left"; he supplies snide comments, provides The Wife with some high quality fucking, and never really takes any action against The Thief. In avenging him, The Wife enlists the help of The Cook, who participates because he too hates The Thief, but also it seems because he is somewhat smitten with The Wife. The Wife recognizes these affections, but doesn't return them. She offers to sleep with The Cook as "payment" for his services in getting even with The Thief, but she certainly does not have any real sexual interest in him. Her heart clearly belongs with The Lover. Perhaps the point is that The Lover is not meant to directly instigate revolution. He provides The Wife and the crew of the kitchen with moral support, escapism, and perhaps a sense of pride in themselves. This seems to inspire them to take back their lives from The Thief's tyranny. It would make sense, in this argument, that The Lover would be martyred; the simple memory of him would be sufficient in powering the revolt.

The Lover is not granted much weight as a character. His relationship between The Wife thickens a little near the end, but his relationship with The Cook and the kitchen crew isn't really developed very strongly at all; we get the idea that they loved him more or less in shorthand. He doesn't really have any contact with them. The Cook allows him and The Wife to meet in his kitchen to make love every night, and he has the androgynous boy bring them food while they are hiding out. When the boy does his singing for them, The Lover gently suggests to him that perhaps it would be best if he put it aside for a while. Before the boy leaves, The Lover lends him a book, an act of kindness that tips off The Thief and leads to The Lover's death. The action says much about The Lover's compassion, but says more in how it codes him as a martyr. I feel that, for the most part, The Lover is not valued by either The Wife or the kitchen staff (or Greenaway really) for who he is as much as for what he represents. In defending him, they are defending the idea of food as culture as opposed to the idea of food as product. They are defending the idea that the intellectual Lover better represents the heart of Britannica than the greedy Thief.

Intriguingly, the hatred that everybody has for The Thief is not represented in shorthand. Certainly not to the extent in which their love for The Lover is. We see, and with great clarity, exactly why he is despised. His most loathsome crime is committed off-screen: beating his pregnant wife as to cause miscarriages and rend her incapable of producing future children, and then casually berating her barren womb in public. Onscreen, he is certainly bad enough; we see enough temper tantrums and casual berating of everybody to assure that he deserves what is coming to him.

Still, I have to say that I feel a little sorry for the little bastard. Watching Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast I was surprised, and really a little disappointed, to see that far from being a rabid dog that you don't want to ever get near, the Ben Kingsley character Don was sort of pathetic. The discomfort between him and the retired thief Gal, who he tries to recruit for one last job, feels very similar to that of the class divide. It vibrates at roughly the same frequency as the "under construction" scene between Steve James and his little brother Stevie in 2002's Stevie. An unspoken subtext to Sexy Beast seems to be Don's resentment of Gal for moving up. I can't speak for all British criminals, as that is one of many aspects of my film education that is dreadfully barren, but I hope that I'll find at least a few who are purely evil and settled into their place at the top. Both Don and The Thief strike me as outsiders desperately trying to find a place within the upper class.

It's fruitful to compare the Thief's temper tantrums in his restaurant with those of Joe Pesci's Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas. Much fun is made of The Thief's endless lectures on French dishes and his fascination with scatology and lowbrow humor. The point is that he really doesn't belong in a fancy French restaurant and we are to laugh at his attempts to try and make this French restaurant his own. There was none of that in Goodfellas. When Pesci attacks the restaurant owner who has the audacity to request he pay the tab, we're just seeing the banality of a tough guy beating up one of his peers ("Can you believe this prick asked me to christen his kid?"). Not so with The Thief. His abuse of The Cook and The Cook's employees has the thorniness of a social inferior attacking his social superior. The restaurant owner in Goodfellas is cowardly and apologetic. The Cook in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is cool-headed and, well, French, underlying the sheer desperation behind The Thief's outbursts.

The Thief's crimes against The Cook are limited to trashing the restaurant and kitchen, and assaulting a second or third-tier chef and the androgynous boy. Indeed he talks to The Cook like a fellow restraunteur, an association that The Cook is very openly incredulous about, if perhaps not openly enough for The Thief's sake. The Cook's every French-accented word drips with disdain as if to say, "You are far far beneath me.” The supposed humor of the situation is that The Thief is too dim or too pathetically unwilling to recognize it.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why The Wife would marry this man, but it makes perfect sense why he would marry her. He does regard her as an object. He sees himself as a man who appreciates the "finer things in life,” and just as he eats the finest food, wears the finest clothing, lives in the finest house and such, he has the finest woman. She is beautiful, sophisticated and very intelligent. And of course The Thief's misogynistic attitudes become the undoing of him, as she is not a mere thing but an organic human being who becomes bored with her boorish husband (oh, that horrible word "boorish") and finds emotional and we are to think sexual satisfaction with somebody more on her level. Of course The Thief murders The Lover in the most brutal fashion imaginable. And of course, he howls in crushed pain, real crushed pain after doing so. The Wife stands up to her husband on two occasions. When forced to tell her Lover about how much money she spends on clothes each week, and how she has the best of everything, she mentions how she also has the best gynecologist. She discloses to this stranger (so thinks The Thief) that she has miscarried and can no longer have children. Which makes her "a safe screw.”

The ending of the film has not been spoiled in other reviews, but alas, having danced around it previously I will be rather explicitly spoiling it for you. At this late point, it may be best to set aside the review until you see the movie. The Wife convinces The Cook to bake the corpse of her Lover. She then invites The Thief to the restaurant and forces him, at gunpoint, to eat the body. The Thief vomits when confronted with the demand, but manages to get a forkful in, at which point The Wife pops him off and condemns him as "cannibal”. I think that I have some ideas on why Greenaway has her kill him, although of course ending the film with her just forcing him to eat would be far more fitting and far more satisfying. Why force him to eat the body? Well, because she overheard him promising to, once he found out about the affair. That's the short answer. It seems though that forcing him to eat the body is the most humiliating punishment that The Wife could think up. The cannibalism effectively alienates The Thief from the fine food that he purports to appreciate and worship (the corpse is a glistening red and is nauseatingly appetizing) as well as revealing that under all the bravado he is just a blowhard. Even though The Wife condemns him as a "cannibal" we understand that he is not. After all he vomits before he eats the food. The Thief isn't a real ogre, and he certainly is not a sophisticate; he's just a pathetic two-bit thug. The force-feeding of this corpse forces him to confront his profound worthlessness.

Not only is The Thief more developed a character than The Lover, he is probably the most developed character in the entire film. This is a technique that Greenaway uses to punish him. Slick two-dimensionality would relieve him of his humanity and allow him to evolve into a concept.

Let's go back to that supposed thesis of the film; that the heart of Britannia is with the cultured and humane Lover and not with the greedy Thief. It is, of course, utter bullshit. The idea that the greed and arrogance represented by The Thief is something new and uncharacteristic, to Britain in particular, is utterly ridiculous. I mean Jesus. This is not a civilization with a history of keeping its dick in its pants. I think that it's quite dangerous to characterize the right as being anti-intellectual, or unthinking and childish. I somehow doubt that the ideology would be quite successful unless there was great strength in the foundation and nuance and intricacy to the fabric. The Thief is no Patrick Bateman, a better icon of Thatcher (Reagan) era greed and arrogance precisely because he implicates the hip art-house crowd that tuned in in the first place. We cannot sanction him as one of the unwashed masses or as an invader to the elite culture. The point is that The Thief is not the sort of person who would probably watch The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover, whereas Patrick Bateman would be the sort of person who would read American Psycho.

But The Wife shoots The Thief. And before doing that she takes some nasty uncompromising revenge on him. The concept of revenge is intriguing to me; I don't think that it has any real practical purpose. If The Wife just wanted to get away, she would conspire to just kill The Thief quickly and efficiently. She would not torture him. Revenge acts to alleviate the stigma of the oppressed from the oppressed by making them the oppressor. I don't think those who take it have any delusions about its righteousness. They know that they are destroying another person's life and that in absolute and objective terms this is wrong, and that quality is exactly what makes it appealing. I know that this aspect is not lost on actress Helen Mirren (who plays The Wife). She mentions in an interview with Roger Ebert how one of the thorny things about this film is that the revenge is satisfying to the audience. That and of course it ties her in with The Thief, in that in a way she is really existing on his brutish level. (If you don't appreciate I Spit on Your Grave now, watch it again and think about the implications of that last line.)

My father tells me that I say all these nasty things about these movies and then give them really high ratings. Indeed, despite everything that I have written, if I were assigning stars The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover would receive a full four. Hypocritical, elitist, probably naive, and yet it's a masterpiece? Well.... it's complex. As with Kill Bill Vol. 2 the fact that this film has these problems doesn't make it stupid or unwatchable, and it certainly doesn't mean that it will not inspire good and worthwhile dialogue. These problems actually do less to cripple The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover than they do to cripple Kill Bill Vol. 2.

In sheer experiential terms, I like this movie more than Kill Bill Vol. 2 actually. I was surprised to realize that Julie Taymor's (enormously impressive) Titus was highly derivative of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. I'm still glad that I saw Titus first though, as it's invaluable in deconstructing the real source of Greenaway's aesthetic. Staginess, over-the-top violence, deliberate but rich use of anachronism, the careful blend of the human and the abstract, the careful blend of the highbrow and the lowbrow, the study of social and cultural stratification? Ah, it's an avant-garde adaptation of William Shakespeare! That makes perfect sense actually; there is actually not a lot in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover that couldn't pass as Shakespearean with just a little tweaking. I am probably far out of my element, but there is a strange quality to much of Shakespeare's work where you feel that a rough outline of the basic story was created (adapted from previous material and history) before he went to work on the characters and their motivations. They have motivations, mind you, rooted in a profound understanding of the human and the sociological, but they are at service to the storyline. This makes Shakespeare ideal for scholarly study of course, and it also makes his work powerfully inorganic apart even from the Elizabethan language. Not at all a bad thing, in particular for the world of theater and art films which often strike me as being oversaturated with the organic, all too frequently attempting to show us "slices of life.” It's worth noting that, in my humble and possibly rather uninformed opinion, Titus along with Orson Welles' Macbeth are the greatest screen adaptations of Shakespeare's work. In part because they are of course very cinematic movies, but also because they rather comfortably inhabit that netherland of the human and the abstract. It is, of course, a virtue shared by Greenaway's film.

The very fact that the film is pseudo-Shakespearean is intriguing, Shakespeare being of course the world's most famous Briton and a knee-jerk icon of high culture. I was surprised to see a comment on the IMDB's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover condemning the film as elitist for all the right reasons, but then bizarrely claiming that Greenaway's "hero" (I think was the term, Greenaway made a strange spin-off film of The Tempest called Prospero's Books) Shakespeare never had formal education. Exqueeze me? Baking powder? He wasn't royalty but his family was fairly wealthy and he did go to school to learn Latin, Greek mythology and, well, how to write! It sounds like he had a pretty classical 16th century education to me. Didn't the man help to translate the King James Bible? Am I missing something?

Anyway, with even less backpedaling I can say that I think my tone with this review has positioned the elitism as more of an almost neutral observation than a real condemnation. Abstract art and satire has the curious effect of cleansing charges of classism, or racism, or sexism. More so than those organic people-films, we can see caricature as being a commentary on an aspect of the human condition and not directly representative of the human condition itself. As with the Kill Bill films really, Greenaway idealizes motherhood as sacred. The denial of motherhood to The Wife is seen as taking something essential and invaluable to her identity and her femininity. It's monstrous. Women who assign little or no value to motherhood may not relate very deeply with the film, nor will they possibly appreciate their femininity being so narrowly defined. Of course, such a complaint is ultimately toothless. Any portrayal of women onscreen will be narrowly defined, one cannot be all things to all people, and so the best we could offer is an equally narrow definition of femininity that does not include motherhood. While one can argue that they feel excluded by the views of women in this film, it's difficult to argue definitively of the morality of these views.

I think that it may be even stickier to definitively criticize the morality behind the classist elitism of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. The film strikes me as naked and even rather auto-critical; the film is Greenaway and Greenaway is the film, and simply cannot stand high enough above the two to condemn them outright. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is not quite one of the best films I have ever seen, but it's in roughly the same ballpark. It's my kind of thing; it vibrates at my frequency, and looks, sounds and feels like a copy of the same ideal. It belongs in the Alex Jackson lexicon. That the heart of it is highly questionable only adds the pleasure of being able to discuss it.