LA GRANDE BOUFFE

France/Italy, 1973, 130 minutes, Colour.
Marcello Mastroianni, Michelle Piccoli, Philippe Noiret, Ugo Tonazzi, Andrea Ferreol.
Directed by Marco Ferreri.

La Grande Bouffe was a cause celebre in 1973-74. Many commentators wrote the film off as simply disgusting. However, it was entered in the competition at Cannes and won the international critics’ award.

Marco Ferreri began to direct films in the late 1950s in his early thirties. He took extreme subjects and presented them in an in-your-face way. This is certainly true of La Grande Bouffe. A group of men hire some prostitutes and go to a villa where they intend to gorge themselves to death. They include a pilot, a cook, a choreographer and a judge. The film is sardonically humorous at times as the four men reflect on their lives, interact with each other, interact with the prostitutes.

However, Ferreri is also a symbolic director and the film is meant to be a fable, a parable about contemporary western civilisation, hedonistically destroying itself. Ferreri writes in a very biting way and is well served by his international cast, two French, two Italians as well as Andrea Ferreol as one of the prostitutes. It has to be said that the prostitutes see through what is happening and, apart from Andrea, actually leave the orgy.

For those who are able to sit through the film (not so difficult in later decades given some of the gross-out films which followed it), the film is a very black fable about the human condition, in the vein of such satirists as Jonathan Swift.

Ferreri continued to make films like this but these films were generally confined to art house release. Examples include his 1977 The Last Woman and his 1980 film, based on the writings of Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness.

1 What was the overall impact of this film? Was it an enjoyable film, or was it a disgusting film, or both? Was it a moralising film, or did the message include the audience? Why?

2 Why was the film made? To rub the audience's nose in disgust? Or for a moralising purpose? How was this deduced from the film itself? If the film was a parable what audience is capable of responding to its parable nature? The popular audience? Specialist audience? If the film was a parable what was its overall intent and meaning?

3. Could the film be seen as an allegory? That is, the details of the persons and their orgiastic death ritual could be paralleled with people and events?

4. An allegory of the Western world eating itself to death without regard to others? Has this interpretation a solid basis in the film? If so. where?

5. The film was about eating. Was the film in good artistic taste? Or was it tastelessly presented? Did the film so involve the audience that their reaction could be one of disgust? Or did the film distance the audience so that it responded in disgust but was distanced enough to understand its meaning? If so, how was this best illustrated from the film?

6. What do the four main characters represent? What world did they come from? In their importance, the judge, the pilot, the T.V. executive, the chef? What aspects of human behaviour and human endeavour did they represent? Were they Everyman characters? (Even though in a pessimistic kind of film?) Was it made clear in the film why each of them went to the weekend? Why did each of them go? What did they intend by the weekend? Merely enjoyment? Did they intend their death?

7. Did they have any intentions about the weekend? The sequences of their preparing for going? The background of their lives? Michel and his work at the TV studio and his relationship with his daughter? Philippe and his relationship with the maid and his mother? His memories? Marcello and his life as a pilot? Hugo and his work as a chef? What did they intend by going to the weekend and secluding themselves away?

8. How did the visual presentation of the food add to the atmosphere of the film both in its quantity and in its quality? The sequences of the food being delivered, the sequences of the food in the kitchen, the cooking sequences, the stylish way in which the food was presented? What attitudes towards food did the film draw from the audience? Did the audience share the feeling towards the food that the main characters had?

9. What was the effect of so much food on them? What is the essential effect of food in eliciting desires from people? How was this operative in the main characters? Why did they rely so much on food? Was rich and plentiful food a symbolism of their yearnings and yet the impossibility of their being fulfilled because they would be surfeited?

10. How did this contrast with their talk about the third world and starvation throughout the world? What physical effect did the food have on them? How disgusting was this? How did this turn the visual presentation of the food into something ugly?

11. The importance of the sequence with Andrea the teacher and the children? Traditions (were the men like this when they were children?) and the discussion of poetry and beauty? The fact that such ugliness could happen where poetry was created?

12. The ambiguous role of Andrea explaining this to the children and then her subsequent behaviour? How pessimistic a sequence therefore was the sequence with the children (even their happy eating?)

13. In what light were the prostitutes seen in view of the food and the gluttony and the hedonism? What comment on sexual morality was being made? How did this contrast with the immorality of the gluttony and the death wish? How normal then were the prostitutes in their disgust of what was going on and their departure?

14. How did this contrast then with Andrea who stayed? How disgusting was the presentation of Andrea and her voracious appetites both hedonistic for the food and sexual? Her staying power? Did this represent the Andrea of sensuality in all men and women? Was this made evident in the film? The fact that Andrea survived? How was she presented visually, disgustingly? How effective was this?

15. How did the film visualise the deterioration of all concerned over the weekend? How did the hedonism and gluttony mean a moral deterioration?

16. Michel and his collapse, his continually breaking wind and his dying in his own excrement? The moral comment made here?

17. Marcello as a more ordinary man: his ordinary lusts, the fact that he was not so involved in the food, his love for the car, his rejection of the group, his being frozen to death in the car? What comment was being made here - did it mean that even though he in some ways rejected what was going on, he could not escape death in what he had given himself to? (The macabre sequences of his being brought into the house dead and his presence there while the others were alive?)

18. Hugo and his vanity about his work as a chef? The fact that he gluttonised himself to death? The point made here?

19. Philippe left alone with Andrea and his ability then to assess the situation? The fact that he vent outside the house? His pondering of whether he had anything to live for? What did he have to live for? before his death? The effect on Andrea as being left alone/alive? What would the effect of the deaths be on her? Could she learn anything from this?

20. If the film was an allegory or a parable, what were the principal messages it wanted to communicate? Did it have a contempt for its characters? Did it have a contempt for its audience? Was the film insinuating that the audience was as bad as the characters?

21. Comment on the successful visual presentation of such ugliness: the use of colour photography, the treatment of each of the main characters in close up etc., the visual presentation of Andrea as normal and then as gross, the enclosed atmosphere of the house and the way that the house and the rooms were filmed, the way the food was filmed, the use of colour, (the symbolic presentation of the food, e.g. the jellies as breasts etc.)? Was the film ultimately pessimistic or was it optimistic enough to be presenting a fable for people to learn from it and so improve themselves? Was the presentation of this film a valid use of scabrous and scatological satire? Was this successful scatological satire (in the line of Gulliver's Travels)?