Word: ferreri
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Italian Actor Marcello Mastroianni happily gorged himself in La Grande Bouffe, Italian Director Marco Ferreri's savage comedy about four men who eat themselves to death. A glutton for punishment, Mastroianni has been lured back for another Ferreri satire. Called Bye Bye Monkey!, it is about an aging, asthmatic gardener who wanders down to a dump in a nameless large city and finds the remains of a movie monster named Macho Kong (no kin to King Kong). Hearing a whimpering sound within the monster's body, Marcello the gardener pulls out a baby chimpanzee, whom he treats like...
EATING BECOMES A LEWD act. Mastroianni, however, longs for real sex, so he calls for his tarts. One of these whores throws herself naked on a cake; sex and eating become one and the same. Except in that director Marco Ferreri depicts eating in complete pornographic detail while restricting his portrayal of sex to angles and acts which coyly protect his male stars and are well within the soft-core boundaries of major studio productions...
...Ferreri follows a straightforward method: He begins with decadence, then pushes it to its extreme. His timing is exact, always cutting away from a scene once depravity is well established, never carrying on for the sake of prurience. Followed properly, this method would shock, never titillate, but the double standards of soft-core pornography weaken The Grande Bouffe. The simulated sex becomes funny in otherwise serious scenes. The film leads from abuse of food to abuse of bodies, but the bodies are less real than the food, so the progression falls flat. A similar problem occurs in suggesting Michel Piccoli...
...Grande Bouffe, like Last Tango in Paris, is a vision of life burning itself out, but in The Grande Bouffe there is no romantic illusion, no disguised depravity. Ferreri makes his points in terms of acting instead of camerawork and soundtrack. The performances he elicits are often remarkable--particularly the outstanding performance of Andrea Ferreol as the teacher who joins the group--and they are well emphasized by the simplicity of his direction. But he is a neutral observer, unlike Bertolucci, unable to make the impact of events accumulate. Weakened by pseudo sex and juvenile scenes about car fetishes...
...Ferreri's greatest problem, however, is that he fails to connect the everyday lives of his characters with their actions at the villa. In the opening scenes, he gives a glimpse of each man's life, but the vignettes connect only superfluous details to the body of the film. This is a film about a decision to die, about a decision by four well-to-do-men that bizarre death on the weekend is somehow worth more than a less frantic hedonism continued over a protracted period. The decision to die cannot be divorced from the work and family lives...