THE COOK, THE THIEF: Cinema's Cruellest Feast (Video Essay)

What if the most exquisite film ever made about power ends with a woman forcing a man to eat a corpse? In The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Peter Greenaway builds the most luxurious restaurant in cinema in order to stage inside it the rawest truth about human appetite. In this essay we trace why eating, for Greenaway, is never only eating, why the philosopher Georges Bataille explains this banquet better than any film theory, and why the final act of revenge is not excess but the logical conclusion of everything that came before. What do you devour, and what devours you? Jorge Lucio de Campos