Andrew reviews the vile and disgusting, La Grande Bouffe.
“You’ve pick the most disgusting way to die!” remarks
one of the characters feasting their lives away in the 1973 Italian art-house
shocker La Grande Bouffe.
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| "Well, you asked for ice cream!!!" |
And we, the viewing public, have picked the
most disgusting film to watch.
Translated to The Big Feast,
the film is a debauched swan dive into wretched excess, testing the audience’s
gag reflex and their ability to keep their jaws from falling to the floor. The premise is simple: four bourgeoisie elites
barricade themselves within a mansion and make a pact to hold a massive banquet,
throw in three hookers to tip it into an orgy, and quite literally eat
themselves to death. No, really, you are
watching these people consume until they burst over the course of two hours,
some expirations worse than others including but not limited to a man dying in
a puddle of his own feces. Closer to the
outrageous transgressions of John Waters’ Pink
Flamingos than the ornate, symmetrical beauty and horror of Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s Salo, La Grande Bouffe begs the question: can you last as long as the
characters in this movie do?
Starring Federico Fellini’s leading man Marcello
Mastoianni, Phippe Noiret (the theater owner in Cinema Paradiso), Michel Piccoli and Ugo Tognazzi, La Grande Bouffe is an ensemble piece
shifting from one scene of decadent overindulgence after another. Much like Salo,
La Grande Bouffe is adorned with
lovely cinematography capturing the gross-out gags with the utmost care and
attention to gastrointestinal detail. Like
A Serbian Film, the cool visual
precision is too handsome for a film like this. The cast of A-list Italian
stars undoubtedly turn over solid performances across the board as the band of
dejected upper class denizens slowly killing themselves. All of this, however, is secondary to the
real aim which is to incite viewers to recycle their dinner quicker than the
characters do.
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| "These grapes should get things moving......." |
There are scenes of food
fighting, excessive flatulence, close-ups of people gorging themselves on food,
explicit sexual content including a metallic dildo, and one particularly vile
episode where burst sewage pipes decorate the household with excrement. There’s a scene where a prostitute straddles
a man bloating with gas, and he agonizingly defecates himself as she mounts
him. One character becomes so stuffed
he’s unable to leave his couch, and his demands that he be force fed while
masturbated are met as he climaxes in the moment of death. These are, really, just a tip of the iceberg
of the completely revolting images unleashed in La Grande Bouffe.
Upon world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, La Grande Bouffe caused a scandal almost
immediately, with its director being booed and spat at during a press
conference. Mastroianni’s fiancée at the
time, Belle De Jour starlet Catherine
Deneuve, reportedly wouldn’t speak to him for a week after they attended the
premiere. While the notoriety brewed by
the onscreen antics no doubt helped box office sales, this still NC-17 rated
shock fest sparked a fair share of angry fistfights at French screenings. Intellectual film theorists were quick to
equate Ferreri’s wallow in excess to the comic satire of bourgeois hollowness
depicted in Spanish surrealist maestro Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, however such sentiment has
clearly read far more into La Grande
Bouffe than Ferreri ever did. It is
the artistic equivalent of Jackass
that happens to be well made with something resembling a plot. In the pantheon of the grossest movies of all
time, La Grande Bouffe reigns high up
there, and if this review has piqued your interest in seeing just how low
“high-brow” French/European art cinema can possibly sink, I sincerely
apologize.
-Andrew Kotwicki