Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
When churlish mobster Albert Spica acquires an upscale French restaurant in London, he dines there nightly, effectively scaring off the clientele with his bad manners. His wife, Georgina, is especially disgusted by him, and soon begins an affair with regular guest Michael. Despite their best efforts to keep it secret, Spica learns about their trysts, and he plots a terrible revenge.
Greenaway's baroque, operatic provocation is one of cinema's most singular achievements. The colour-coded production design by Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs, Michael Nyman's insistent score, and Sacha Vierny's lateral tracking shots through the restaurant create a visual language wholly unlike anything else in cinema. Michael Gambon delivers a towering, terrifying performance as Spica, matched by Helen Mirren's quietly devastating Georgina. The film functions as a savage Thatcherite allegory about greed, ownership, and bodily consumption, executed with avant-garde audacity. The ending — the cannibalism as ultimate revenge — is conceptually perfect but its execution feels slightly too deliberate and stagey, losing some of the raw power the preceding acts built up. Novelty is exceptional; this film is genuinely one-of-a-kind in conception and execution.