"Your mouth smells like a borscht"

"We're flesh, potential carcasses. If I go to the butcher, I'm always surprised for not being there instead of the beef."

As James and I generally like to look for films that push the boundaries of the grotesque and horrifying, just to see what will finally, truly gross us out (Salo I think has so far come the closest), we thought we'd give the infamous La Grande Bouffe a shot. It didn't exactly satisfy our appetite for shocking cinema but did offer an interesting take on wealthy European culture.

Director Marco Ferreri's scandalous 1973 film La Grande Bouffe (which can also be found under the title Blow-Out) scathingly addresses European conspicuous consumption and sociocultural issues. The film may seem a bit empty at first but it actually offers quite a bit of witty and somewhat subtle insight.

It follows the story of four middle-aged friends- Marcello the pilot (played by the wonderful Marcello Mastroianni), Phillipe the judge (Phillipe Noiret), Michel the television executive (Michel Piccoli) and Ugo the chef (Ugo Tognazzi). They decide to hole up in Phillipe's gorgeous Parisian villa for a gargantuan, non-stop feast. They hire some floozies to keep them company and invite the local school teacher Andrea (Andréa Ferréol), a plump and somewhat more sensual and healthy contrast to the other women, whom Phillipe proposes marriage to almost immediately. Their living is reduced to the most basic functions: eating, drinking, burping, sleeping, vomiting, fucking, pissing and shitting, with the men's ultimate goal of eating themselves to death.


The characters of the 4 men seem to personify power and the three manifestations of that ideology- justice (Phillipe), spectacle (Michel), food (Ugo) and adventure (Marcello). Their male sexuality is reduced to impotence, indifference and regression as their bodies begin to deteriorate as a result of the mass gorging. You will never see so much farting, humping and humping whilst farting done in such an artful way in cinema such as this. Marcello is a self proclaimed "sex maniac" and once all of the prostitutes leave, Andrea stays and proceeds to do all of the sleeping around...and all of the men in the house. Though it is unclear if she is sticking around simply to indulge herself or if she shares the same goal as the men, she stays around right until the very end.

What's unfortunate about this film is that it really lacks any semblance of a plot or back story and more so focuses on some rather drawn out bingeing, farting and rather unappealing looking sex. There isn't any apparent reason for any of these men to be doing all of this in the first place, we're just sort of led to chalk it up to mid-life listlessness and ennui with their rich-man lives. This makes it all feel sort of meaningless and is what left me feeling a little disappointed.



Ferreri does reveal their double-mindedness at points like when they are faced with the first death of the group and Michel finds himself uncontrollably weeping over the body. This also marks the point where most of the dark humor stops and you're left to endure the slow turmoil and melancholic descent of the rest of the characters. I really appreciated the subtle ways of showing the human-animal parallel, like how they placed the bodies of Marcello and Michel in the refrigerating room, their bodies occupying the same space as the animal carcasses, as Ugo, Phillipe and Andrea sat down to attempt to eat another meal in front of them. All of the sort of soul-crushing inevitability of the ending of this film is lightened just once more (well lightened in a, you know, very dark sort of way...) with Phillipe's death. This plump and somewhat breast obsessed man gorges himself to death at last by eating two enormous, tit-shaped mounds of pink pudding, complete with nipples! That to me was a great way to end the film and bring together all the dark wit and satire of the first part of the film. My other favourite scene, and definitely the most absurd, was when the toilet in Marcello's bathroom somehow erupts and showers him with a river of shit. Horrifying but hilariously played.

This film is just riddled with so many small details and pretty much every scene is open to interpretation, most likely leading to some existential meaning and view on the bourgeois. I think if it weren't for Ferreri's ability to lace the film with all of these clever allusions and intelligent black humor, it may not have been able to keep me watching for the entirety of it's nearly 2 and a half hour running time. I mean, there are only so many food fueled sex scenes one movie can sustain without a little more of a point. Did I find it shocking? No. Did I find it gross? Excessive eating tends to put me off food for a bit, but not long, and the thought of having sex with someone while they may possibly be soiling themselves is pretty nasty. So, a little bit, yes, but not very much. Overall, I'm still unsure as to how much I really liked the film. I still feel somewhat unsatisfied and think that perhaps curiosity draws people to the film a little more than it's substance. If you've watched Last Tango in Paris, La Maman et la Putain and even The Cook, the Theif, His Wife and Her Lover, then you should watch this film.


Oh, and a couple of random but interesting facts: the Chinese ambassador that we briefly meet when the men first arrive at the villa apparently happened to be just walking by during filming and put in the movie; the villa is now the Vietnamese Embassy; the actors apparently did a lot of real eating for their scenes in the film.