La grande bouffe (The Big Feast)
Included in the Marco Ferreri Collection
In Ferreri's greatest international success, four friends hole up with some call girls and a local schoolteacher in a Parisian villa to eat themselves to death. Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret.
Member Reviews
Hammering Your Sensibilities - CharleyJames
La grande bouffe is to food as The Exorcist is to Song of Bernadette.
It's the story of four friends who gather for a weekend of eating, sex and debauchery that reveals itself to be a suicide pact, literally before our eyes and not a morsel of the feast goes undocumented.
In a way, the movie works like The Iceman Cometh. After four hours trapped in Eugene O'Neill's run-down Irish saloon with a menagerie of defeated alcoholics, we don't exactly rush out for a drink. Only Iceman had a humanistic substructure and something to say about its characters; Le grande bouffe is essentially just a chronicle of gluttony and self-hate.
It’s either the most disgusting and decadent film in the history of France or a savage, radical attack on the bourgeois establishment.
Catherine Deneuve went to see it with Marcello Mastroianni, one of its stars and her lover at the time, and wouldn’t speak to him for a week. The film went on to become the largest-grossing release in the history of Paris while inspiring fistfights and insults on the Champs Elysees.
Le grande bouffe didn't leave me so much excited as exhausted. There is no doubt great significance in the way the characters talk about themselves, each other and French society; there is a double-reverse message to be found in the utter contempt with which the prostitutes are treated. The sight of bourgeoisie pigs being pigs is an attack on their pigginess.
These are things French intellectuals argue about, but for me the film was more of an experience than a treatise; it doesn't have philosophical depth but it hammers your sensibilities. It's decadent, self-loathing, cynical and frequently obscene. But there's one thing you can say for it, as Terry Curtis Fox did in his review when the movie was released: "This film reaffirms my faith that it is still possible to be offended by a film.”Dude, where's my subtitles?? - Kubla_Conde
I'd heard good things and assume they are all true but ma francais ne bien pas! Oh well, I was able to skip forward to the scenes that really mattered (the food scenes, the sex scenes). Still, I have to feel I would have got a lot more out of this film if I'd been able to understand what they were saying.Must See - Pantagruel
Most reviews of this film will no doubt begin with the proviso: "not for everyone." This couldn't be farther from the truth. Le Grande Bouffe delves into matters that uncontestably concern everyone: nutrition, sex, defecation, and death. Of particular interest is the presentation of how the four bourgeois Frenchman dealth with this tetrad of human inevitabilities. Consider the acceptable horrors of slaughtered pigs and other animals carried in by the distasteful working class butchers from their stained white truck, contrasted against the revulsion we feel when the toilet explodes (another white surface), sending excrement throughout the house. Shit and food bear uncomfortably close associations in many of the sequences, often compared to the natural lubrication of the sex organs. Le Grande Bouffe is in many ways a Freudian, art-house precursor of Cronenberg, or even The (first) Matrix. There is a Greenaway-esque, mathematical sensibility to the mise-en-scene, firmly attached to the thematic notion that "what goes in, must come out," that every succulent bite, every moment of hedonistic, oral pleasure, brings you one step closer to death. This is what the four rich men realize: to live is to die. If nourishment itself is killing you, why not accelerate the process, accelerate the pleasures, and have some agency in the matter? Long before the Hemlock Society and Dr. Kevorkian, director Marco Ferreri was making the argument that the unnecessary prolongment of death was a consequence of life, and required only the conscious ingestion of carefully selected substances. The only difference in Le Grande Bouffe, is that rather than dying with a whimper, each of our heroes goes out with a resounding, flatulent bang. You'll just have to watch it and ... smell!
Member Reviews
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Hammering Your Sensibilities - CharleyJames
La grande bouffe is to food as The Exorcist is to Song of Bernadette.
It's the story of four friends who gather for a weekend of eating, sex and debauchery that reveals itself to be a suicide pact, literally before our eyes and not a morsel of the ...Dude, where's my subtitles?? - Kubla_Conde
I'd heard good things and assume they are all true but ma francais ne bien pas! Oh well, I was able to skip forward to the scenes that really mattered (the food scenes, the sex scenes). Still, I have to feel I would have got a lot more out of this film if ...Must See - Pantagruel
Most reviews of this film will no doubt begin with the proviso: "not for everyone." This couldn't be farther from the truth. Le Grande Bouffe delves into matters that uncontestably concern everyone: nutrition, sex, defecation, and death. Of particular interest ...