Word: ferreri
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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...
There's no joy at Ferreri's table: their passions and appetites spent the revelers have no place to go. It's the presence of melancholy and death in the face of a sensational bacchanal that distinguishes Ferreri's feast of carrion from its lowbrow cousins. Characters in porn movies are evaluated with regard to their sexual prowess and their freedom from guilt, and they are never more than temporarily unhappy: more frequent and more intense sex can solve any passing malaise. But here, the pleasures of the flesh are but harbingers of the coffin, and Ferreri's pestilential houseparty...
Porn people, those guiltless joy-seekers, may inspirt our envy and ignite our lascivious fantasies, wheras Ferreri's party-makers have only our pity, and our disgust. In porn, and in "advanced" movies of the sixties such as "La Dolce Vita," say, or "L'Avventura," decadence and dissipation are chic, inviting; the houseparty in "The Grande Bouffe" is entirely without glamour. You'll remember in "La Dolce Vita" the character of Paola the Innocent who represents the possibility of a higher and finer life than the one Marcello slips into. Here, Marcello has no options--he's sunk, irretrievably...