LA GRANDE BOUFFE Movie Review

The Blow-Out

There are food movies and there is La Grande Bouffe. Director Marco Ferreri's spectacularly unnecessary movie about four affluent, middle-aged men who decide to commit suicide by gorging can't exactly be called a cautionary fable; we see what the physical effects of non-stop eating are, but they're nothing we didn't suspect. Stomach pains, diarrhea, endless, high-decibel farting, chest pains, incontinence, death. The plush chateau where Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli, and Philippe Noiret do themselves in is also equipped with a plump, sexually starved schoolteacher (Andrea Ferreol), with whom the men attain other forms of pleasure (she gets to share the men's food, too). I can't deny that there's a certain fascination for the audience in all this—kind of like stopping by the pie-eating contest at the state fair to see how many of ma's peach pies little Timmy can wolf down before he throws up. But at the state fair you can at least move on to the swine exhibit; here you're trapped in the theatre for over two hours, with no place to hide while that ominous dark puddle begins to gently fan out under Michel Piccoli's pants. La Grande Bouffe provides shocks, all right, but since the movie's not really about anything, the shocks have no power. Each man's death is like a new dish-spinning act on Ed Sullivan; you may be impressed, but you won't exactly go away with food for thought. I'm sure there's a pointed metaphor in the movie somewhere about gluttony, fascism, and the bourgeois-capitalist value system. I tell you what—you find it, and get back to me. I'm going to see Tampopo.

NEXT STOP … Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, The Last Woman, Tales of Ordinary Madness

1973 125m/C FR Marcello Mastroianni, Philippe Noiret, Michel Piccoli, Ugo Tognazzi, Andrea Ferreol; D: Marco Ferreri; W: Marco Ferreri, Rafael Azcona; C: Mario Vulpiani; M: Philippe Sarde. VHS WBF