Most of it takes place in an out-of-the-way London restaurant nestled at the end of a wind-whipped and smoke-strewn cul-de-sac patrolled by a pack of scavenging dogs: an image of desolation that suggests the most recent visitor thereabouts might well have been the Luftwaffe. The actual best customer and part owner of the place is an uncultured hoodlum (Michael Gambon) who, before going in to dine, attends to business in the car park by stripping the clothes off a recalcitrant debtor, smearing the man's body with dog shit, and then peeing on him. Just the thing to work up an appetite. This fellow, our titular thief, does not observe a different code of etiquette indoors. He slaps his wife -- the titular wife -- with a menu when she corrects his mispronunciation of the French word for fish as "poison," talks incessantly at a Captain Kidd volume that precludes polite conversation at any other table, intermittently bullies an arbitrarily selected patron, and generally conducts himself in a manner that makes you wish James Bond would stop in unexpectedly for a late supper of sole meunière. That doesn't seem likely, but neither does it seem likely that this barbarian would ever in the first place have linked up with this particular wife (Helen Mirren), whose comportment suggests she is in the daily habit of having high tea with the Queen. When a couple of silent glances between her and a nice-looking bookworm (Alan Howard), seated at a table roughly thirty feet away, are sufficient to set up a lovers' rendezvous in a stall in the Ladies' Room, you realize that this is a "conceptual" film and not a representation of any sort of life you might recognize or take an interest in. There had been plenty of other, earlier tipoffs to the film's "conceptual" nature: the wife's dress, for instance, changes color to match the décor of the room, so that it's a blue dress when she's outdoors and then a red dress in the dining room and then a white dress inside the loo. Because the movie was made by Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman's Contract, A Zed and Two Noughts), one can be sure that there is a good reason for everything in it. Well, a reason, anyhow. But does one really want to hear it? Does talk of "Jacobean revenge tragedy" make it go down any easier when, for the pièce de résistance, a human cadaver shellacked like a suckling pig is paraded out as the plat du jour? (And does a single little forkful from the abdomen justify the culinary time and effort that must have gone into this preparation?) Some degree of plausibility, some level of normalcy, needs to have been established in order for such an extravagance to have an impact -- other, that is, than as a damn ugly and silly thing to look at. On this score Greenaway is positively no Tourneur: neither a Cyril nor (in Greenaway's own actual art form and century) a Jacques. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd