The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover

Peter Greenaway, a British artist of the cinema, release from 1989
The tableaus that strongly match the traditions of classical, most obviously Flemish, large scale portraiture. The long smooth sideways pans, constantly reframing a new picture of this kind. The camera is kept at a waist level to create this look, as few floors or ceilings are seen. This reduces depth (as do the colour schemes of each scene), though the lens is reasonably deep; or rather, the lens is perhaps not too wide, but the focus often pulling deeper than the action gives a sense of depth even as the figures are flattened, a seeming contradiction.
The lighting schemes and staging further the relation to fine arts. Often we have a clothesline staging, though saying that there are some framings where actors' back are to us (reminiscent of various last supper pictures). The lighting is deliberately theatrical, with depth at once alluded to and killed, as though from the sides of a prosenium arch. The smoke acts as a reflector for outside, indoors we often have individual, non natural, gaudily coloured spots. These can indicate faces, but often draw the attention away. This means that the whole frame is activated, as our eyes are not exclusively centred, always (quite often, to be fair, it is) in the centre of the picture.
The film employs so many framings that alude to the history of visual art. It creates in this sense a classic mis-en-scene, but almost taken to its logical extremes, so a sort of Bazinian world in fact becomes hugely unnatural. It lets us at once recognise the beauty, the artificiality, of that Rubens etc world. Yet set off against this is the earthiness of the content. the lacivious theme that runs to the food and the sex, creates a Passolini like disjuntion between the form and the content. The question is; is the food/ sex at once complicit in the evil we have portrayed, or is it another world, a better, richer world? Such simple dichotomies are surely rather reductive.
This film uses a large number of, related but not explicitly Brechtian, alienation techniques. The break up of the song numbers, the framings, conversations about film, various artificialities, all draw us away from the picture. This is often a matter of timing; some element intruding on the other, just as sentimentality threatened. This lets us take a critical distance to the pictoral aspects, asks us to question our relation, even our complicity (as the diners) in the search for the beautiful picture (see Greenaway's 'Nightwatching', and other pictures we anticipate. The songs that break in are the most obvious to draw us out.
The score by Michael Nyman is on its own melacnholic, intensely sweet while wistful. Oddly similar to Nyman 'Man With A Movie Camera Score', but much slower, and crossed with Miles Davis. It constantly threatens to sentimentalise. Overall though, it generally succeeds in always setting off, rather than acting to exaggerate, the 'romance'. It gives them a grandeur we know they don't have. It rather acts as a 'could be'. This is similar to the score (as are some lighting patterns and colour scheming) to 'In The Mood For Love'. The beauty of the romance lies not in it itself, but in our setting off from it, distance from it.
We can see that Greenaway incorporates elements of the opera (songs), as well as other music forms, theatrical looks that take their lead, shockingly so for a film, from traditions of fine art. His long framings of a long duration, with analytical cut ins to show faces more clearly, are peculairaly cinematic.
Greenway is no classical storyteller, and his scenes work on their own, in an almost fable like manner (note the intertitles). The relation to a morality play, or a Jacobean revenge tragedy, is clear. This is further enhanced by people being known by their job title.
The vengance plot, with the destruction of various world, marks the break up of the more classical mis-en-scene and a move to more modern, less lateral, and deeper, portraiture (and the location of these scenes moved from the restraurant to the bookshop; by the end, the restaurant loses its place as a place of light portraiture).
The morality of this film is difficult (not on a shocking level), in the sense that there is the risk of sentimentalising the wife and the lover. They recognise this. The valorization of Intellectual culture (French) could paint the wife and her lover as too 'good', failing to recognise how they, to, have little to talk about. Greenaway does not seem to be entirely in either direction; this deserves more thought than can be given here.
Greenaway frankly puts 99% of the British cinema to shame. A formally ambitious, and crucially, thoughtful. In this deeply rich film every shot, every movement and action, has been thought, thought, and thought again. Their is not a hint of laziness, but a genuine questioning of why anything is used, what it is used for, what it means. His mis-en-scene is beautiful, his themes worth thinking about, his art something that stands alone, to be engaged with. The work of a master.