Word: porn
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...theme is the folly of moral anarchy, but Ferreri himself holds back: he is a strict, even severe director who allows not one arty shot or lyrical moment to intrude onto his bleak canvas. Slowly, carefully, his film builds, snaring us by its opposing tensions. Porn brushed with intense moral vigilance, the movie keeps turning on itself, proffering and withdrawing erotic titillation, discovering laughter and terror in the retreat from social restraints...
...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 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...
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...
Adapting the audacious lawlessness of the porn movie to his Swiftian demolition of untrammeled appetite, his parable, as many critics have read it, of the collapse of modern society, Ferreri has arrived at a tantalizing blend: the dirty movie with the heart of an impassioned medieval moralist. The director has the puritan's inevitable fascination with sin and corruption: he's titillated by what he shows us, but he's repelled, too--and it's that moralistic disapproval, that unconcealable sense of shock, that separates his work, for all its salacious preoccupations, from that of the true, unstricken pornographers...