The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

Greenaway describes the impulses behind his work as "technical and aesthetic and cerebral and academic." His films have not been developed according to the demands of narrative ("Cinema is much too important to be left to the storytellers," says Greenaway), but by equally deterministic formulas of the director's own devising: formalism, structural symmetry, recurring patterns and symbols, puns and conceits.

At its core a simple tale of adultery, jealousy and revenge, THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER is built around the four characters of the title, the divisions of the restaurant (each room perhaps representing its own historical epoch), the tradition o...