These visually stunning, ever-changing scenes could only exist on film, and the artifice is a great part of the work's effectiveness. The wife's dress, which is red in the dining room, becomes white in the ladies' room. And quick cuts allow the characters' costumes to change color to match each new room they enter. The film is so imbued with art and artifice that when the camera pans from one set to another, it is obvious that the fourth wall does not exist.
It is dominated by a copy of a Frans Hals painting, whose 17th-century characters wear clothing remarkably like that of the thief's unsavory group. To the right of the kitchen is the dining room, with bright red walls, carpets and table settings. In this gigantic room, a boy with punkish blond hair chants in an angelic voice while washing dishes and a man cleans a duck, causing white feathers to fall through the air like heavy snow. It is an eerie place, a mix of post-modern pipes and medieval-looking cauldrons. They walk through a warehouse-sized door that opens onto a restaurant kitchen overseen by the cook (Richard Bohringer). It is a scene that quickly establishes the thief's character -worse than a maggot's - though not the overall tone of the film. There, the thief (Michael Gambon) takes his vengeance on a man who has somehow crossed him, tearing off the man's clothes, smearing excrement on his body. The film opens in a neon-lighted parking lot where dogs fight over hunks of raw meat, and maggoty fish and pigs' heads rot in garbage trucks. Greenaway creates such intensity that it is impossible to turn away from the screen. And though it is not easy to sit through this film, which begins by pushing the thief's most repulsive behavior in our faces, Mr. But unlike most X-rated films, ''The Cook'' has nothing sensational, pornographic or disreputable about it. The film received an X rating for its overall content, and the distributor subsequently decided to release it unrated. The notoriety that surrounds the film sheds more light on the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system than it does on Mr. Greenaway turns this tale of a bullying criminal and his unfaithful wife into something profound and extremely rare: a work so intelligent and powerful that it evokes our best emotions and least civil impulses, so esthetically brilliant that it expands the boundaries of film itself.
''The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover'' may sound like another civilized marital minuet. If the most crass and sadistic people gained power, what would happen to the social order, to art and, above all, to love? This is the question Peter Greenaway explores in his elegant, stylized and brutal new film.
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