Critics reviews

What if the Food Network remade Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom? I’ve seen this movie maybe three to five times in my life, and by the end of its more than two-hour running time, the cumulative effect of the debaucheries displayed never fails to pack a revolting punch.

If the promise of canonical film school heartthrobs - among them Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, and Michel Piccoli - gorging and fucking themselves to death in a provincial villa sets your heart a-racing, close that incognito tab and treat yourself to La Grande Bouffe. . . . Full bellies and belly-laughs await the hungry viewer - after two-hours-and-change of bilious morbidity, the next home-grown, garden-variety orgy you read about will seem like little more than a light snack.

Ferreri isn't Buñuel's peer in terms of the sophistication of his jokes or the polish of his formality, but this bluntness is intentional. There's little satirical orientation in La Grande Bouffe, beyond its catchall parody of entitlement. A viewer can't safeguard themselves from the extremity of Ferreri's nihilism by clinging to what his film is "about," and this is the director's most startling achievement.

Marco Ferreri directed this 1973 black comedy, which satirizes two of France's most cherished institutions: dining and whoring. The fun begins when you realize that each actor is using his or her own real name.

Four well-off, well-bred, pot-bellied white men make a pact to seal themselves off in a mansion, take delivery of a truck-load of fresh meat, and then proceed to eat themselves to death. What must have looked like the freshest, edgiest, most outlandish and ribald movie of 1973 now comes across as an exercise in crass tedium and satire that's so garishly indelicate, there may as well be regular inter-titles which flash up the words: "PS This Is An Allegory" in blood-red bubble writing.

Jaded, authentically perverted, drenched in ennui, this absurdist nightmare is a locus classicus of 1970s chateau erotica. In all its seedy sophistication and degraded hedonism, it focuses not on desire but disgust.

Director Marco Ferrerri presumably had some kind of radical, philosophical justification for all this – a symbolic attack on bourgeois excess, perhaps, though that’s not exactly original. But in a modern context, the film just looks crass, shallow and self-satisfied.

“La Grande Bouffe” didn’t leave me so much excited as exhausted... for me, the film was more of an experience than a treatise; like “The Exorcist,” it doesn’t have philosophical depth when you think about it, but in the theater it hammers your sensibilities.

If “La Grande Bouffe” were no more than a metaphor, or if it was meant as serious contemplation of world's end, it would be intolerable; one of the most decadent films ever made. It does, however, have surface life of its own. It is vulgar vaudeville on an epic scale, beautifully performed by four of Europe's finest comic actors.

People who... expect a class satire [will find] something that [goes] far beyond, into the infantile nature of compulsion, a film whose implications, and provocations, [are] cosmically rather than comically visceral.

This is certainly a film with something to offend everyone. Its bleak, bawdy humour is anything but subtle, with each character carefully designed to reflect what Ferreri considered to be modern evils - the injustice perpetuated by the corrupt judicial system; the cultural inanity encouraged by television; the greed of the developed world when much of the planet was starving; and the restless urge to travel, both to escape from domestic reality and to bring about a global village that could be more easily conquered and exploited.