Word: grandees
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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...
Like "Last Tango," "The Grande Bouffe" derives added shock value from the presence of stars: it's not Linda Lovelace, but respectable people like Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi taking the chance of their careers, letting loose, talking dirty, abandoning themselves to the urges of the unleashed libido.
The first law of the true-blue porn 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...
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...
Morality aside, "The Grande Bouffe" is a liberatingly funny pitch-black comedy. Ferreri assaults us. You're bound to be caught off guard by the overheated outhouse humor, the bloated, fetid atmosphere, the absorption with vomit and excrement, the colossal disrespect for human anatomy. Like pornography, it turns us (whether...