Marco Ferreri’s landmark film is an unparalleled orgy of food, sex, and food, that scandalized world cinema when it won the Cannes Film Festival’s International Critics Award in 1973. Both a bawdy tale of wine and women, and an irreverent dig at bourgeois self-indulgence, the films follows four middle-aged professional men (superbly portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret) as they leave their days jobs as pilots, chefs, lawyers and TV producers, and meet for one final orgiastic weekend filled with gourmet food, call girls, and a lusty schoolteacher! As the Bacchanalian feast unfolds, the quartet of gorging gourmands play out a blackly humorous parable of modern societal collapse in a film the New York Times called ""vulgar vaudeville on an epic scale…a mordant, chilling, hilarious dirty movie."" More than thirty years later, La Grande Bouffe continues to challenge audiences’ sensibilities and test the limits of good taste.
An agent for a liqueur company, he became involved in the cinema by making short advertising films; later he worked in the production sector and finally in the sale of cinema equipment, moving to Spain. There he met the young humorist Rafael Azcona, with whom he set up an extraordinary, lasting working relationship: the first fruits of their partnership were “El pisito” (1958), “Los chicos” (1959) and “The Little Coach (El cochecito)” (1960), the three “Spanish comedies” marked by a corrosive anti-bourgeois sarcasm. On returning to Italy, Ferreri continued his Spanish theme with “Queen Bee (L’ape regina)” (1963), an anti-Catholic satire in which the institution of matrimony is so fiercely under fire as to unleash the ire of the censor (requiring various cuts in the film and a slight change to the title). He fared no better with “The Ape Woman (La donna scimmia)” (1964), a bitter and lucid parable on the relationships between the sexes, dominated by the exploitation of the weaker sex… read more
"To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it's a physiological act, it's urban guerrilla ... Enough with feelings, I want to make a physiological film." ~ Marco Ferreri
A wonderfully Rabelaisian revel in basic human functions and a bawdy reverse version of the lower rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – shelter, sex, food, excretion.
Ferrari is a precise master… read review
