SOURCE: Van Wert, William F. Review of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, by Peter Greenaway. Film Quarterly 44, no. 2 (winter 1990–1991): 42–50.

In the following review, Van Wert confronts Greenaway's critics by arguing that The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover cannot be analyzed in the traditional manner because of the way that Greenaway views a film as “a total work of art.”

D. H. Lawrence once defined pornography as the confusion, due to anatomical proximity and cultural interdict, of the reproductive organs with the excretory organs. The scandal is that the confusion still reigns and conspires to give Peter Greenaway's brilliant film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover an X rating, summarily (and rightly) refused by Greenaway and Miramax, the film's American distributor. Still, the incredible good fortune of finding a Dutch patron/producer (Kees Kasander) willing to finance three film...