Word: ferreri
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Marco Ferreri's "The Grande Bouffe" trips over prize-winning foreign films of the sixties, tickles us with memories of Fellini and Resnais and Bunuel, of Antonioni and claustrophobic chamber works by Bergman. But the movie's greatest debt is not to the preceding era's prestigious portraits of European decadence but to the laws of the universe--the ways of the world--as the porno movie sees them. Ferreri's is a porn epic in the grand manner, a mordant, chilling, hilarious dirty movie that, for sheer audacious lubricity, out-tangoes "Last Tango in Paris" and almost gives...
...Ferreri has set out with a fierce will to challenge audience sensibility, and his Rabelaisian romp establishes new levels of rauchy foul taste in art house--as distinct from 42nd Street--porn movie fare. In manner and matter, Ferreri is working on a level that the makers of "Deep Throat" could not --and would not--aspire to, but his movie's lifelines are decidedly pornographic...
...movie is the tyranny of the flesh: we dont see the characters in "The Grande Bouffe" otherwise occupied than at the feast, their one obsessive, consuming goal the constant satisfaction of the senses. Locking themselves away from the world in a mausoleum of a house and shedding civilized restraints, Ferreri's cardboard figures are participants in a porn-movie banquet, questers in search of absolute freedom. At their non-stop weekend orgy, food and sex are available in unlimited supply, and as with the Linda Lovelaces and Felicity Splits of the blue-movie screen, too much is not enough...
...graphic enough and features, besides several odd sexual couplings, scenes of vomiting, diarrhea and other indelicate interludes. None are very pleasant, but none are really disturbing either, because Ferreri is not using them for any other purpose except would-be shock. He does not deal in satire that could threaten or amuse, that could give the sequences substance and, therefore, true impact. His careful chronicle of the dietary excesses of four men is like a prank-a loud, bad practical joke. The men-Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret-hole up in an old house...
Whatever symbolic or ideological potential the story of La Grande Bouffe might have had, whatever opportunity for Swiftian outrage or the savage surrealism of a Bunuel, is extinguished by Ferreri's obstinate insensitivity. It could conceivably be argued that the film is a metaphor for the fate of a society sated by its own prosperity, obsessed by its own comforts. It is difficult, however, to credit such subtleties to a director whose idea of a good visual pun is a man holding a turkey between his legs while a woman cuts the squealing bird's head off with...