Customer Reviews
Disgusting, entriguing and utterly, utterly mad... - By: W. van der Lande, 25 Jun 2008 
You'll either love or hate this film. It is both utterly grotesque & beautifully amusing. Gambon is masterful & dominates throughout, as his character is wont to do. As this is very much an abstract film (Being set around a single elaborate restaurant) where the colour of the character's clothes is dependent upon which room they're in, the characters are also very abstract. The characters, bar Gambon & Tim Roth & his cronies, tend to be rather static, not moving much, & the lovemaking is slow & tender.
It is a fascinating picture, & definately not one you would want to watch with your grandparents. Watch it if you so desire, but be very wary for what may be in store for you.
Back cover - By: Alerlabaster Codifier, 16 Feb 2008 
Ace film I cannot recommend it enough but please do not look at the back of this DVD until you've seen it as there is a MAJOR spoiler.
Brutal and grotesque...and a great film - By: C. O. DeRiemer, 04 Nov 2007 This is a movie many people either love or hate; & I like it a lot. It's alll style, alll color, alll rage. A thief (Michael Gambon as Albert Spica) & his wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren) with his toadies & gang members dine each night at the restaurant of the cook (Richard Bohringer). Spica is a monster; crude, loud & a bully with the table manners of a hog. The first scene in the movie is Spica, his gang & their women getting out of their cars in a dark, wet allleyway & preparing to enter the restaurant through the kitchen. But first they deal with a guy who owes Spica money. His gang brings Spica dog excrement on pieces of paper; Spica wipes the stuff alll over the other guy's face & mouth. They strip him down while the women watch & Spica continues to smear him. He pokes at the cowering man on the ground with his cane, while others kick at him. Then he urinates on him...but chews out a toadie who was going to do the same because the toadie might offend the women. Spica's behavior doesn't get any better. Georgina Spica wears matyrdom like a cloak. Eating every night in the restaurant is a shy, book-loving man (Alan Howard) who ignores the uproar Albert & his gang create. He & Georgina see each other & he becomes her lover, making love everywhere in the restaurant that they can find where it's quiet, with the help of the cook. The thief finds out & deals with the lover. The wife takes her revenge with the complicity of the cook in a grotesque & appropriate way.
Sounds simple enough, but this movie is a powerhouse. The look of the film, like so much of Greenaway's stuff, is lush & highly stylized. The rooms of the restaurant have their own colors & the costumes of the actors change colors as they move from room to room. The kitchen is huge & strange, with boiling kettles, hanging instruments & tables piled high with glassware & dishes; with geese being plucked in clouds of feathers; with fat, half-naked men stirring steaming sauce pans. A white-haired, retarded boy does simple tasks while singing in a counter-tenor.
The movie, I think, seems to be about anger & retribution. Gambon is a powerful as Albert Spica, completely repellant, domineering & absolutely fascinating. Helen Mirren is superb, & one of the bravest actors around. Her humiliation at the hands of her husband just goes on & on. Her scenes of sexual escape with Alan Howard are hardly erotic, but they are explicit & strong.
Greenaway has done a number of films. I think a lot of Prospero's Books (1991) & The Draughtsman's Contract (1982). He's a director you have to get in the mood for, though. He doesn't make easy films.
Not for the faint-hearted.. - By: ChezzyD, 18 Jul 2007 I saw this film with a group of friends when it first came out. I think we were expecting to see something different. However, the film had a huge impact on me. Never have I been so revolted or fascinated by a film. It is so graphicallly brutal & so beautifully visualised, it skewers alll of our peccadilloes about sex, food & bodily functions but then disarms you with its observations about love & sacrifice. Michael Gambon is in career-best form as the vicious Spica whose treatment of his wife Georgina, a wonderfully understated Helen Mirren, leads her into a dangerous affair with restaurant guest Michael. The chef protects the lovers from Spica's wrath by hiding them in his kitchen where they are surrounded by dead animals & kitchen implements. Death, sex, food & the body are alll intimately linked throughout the film - Freud would have been coughing on his pipe-smoke. But even though there is graphic violence & nudity, the effect is not what I would calll titillating. Instead, the film is shot as if a theatre piece, or a series of tableaux. The colours are rich & sumptuous & Gaultier's costumes lend an air of decadence. Whether you 'enjoy' the film or not there is no doubting its value as a work of art. And as art, the film is, above alll things about what we see, or do not see: the 2 lovers do not even speak to each other for most of the film. We barely need them to, so rich is the visual feast. This film has as much power almost 2 decades later, even in our supposedly more jaded decade. I would recommend this to anyone who has a strong stomach or who has an appreciation of films that are outside the mainstream.
ignore the people who do not like the film, they are plebs! - By: A. Fox, 20 Jun 2007 fantastic / British/if punk were a film this would be it. Buy it & watch & keep watching it!
