Weight Watchers

By J. C.

LA GRANDE BOUFFE

Directed by MARCO FERRERI

Screenplay by MARCO FERRERI and RAFAEL AZCONA

For purposes of publicity, and for the advancement of the box office receipts, the distributors of La Grande Bouffe would like moviegoers to be scandalized by: gluttony, scatology, sexual perversion, assorted malfunctions of the gastrointestinal tract and a rather florid disposition toward suicide. This may also have been the intention of Director Ferreri. Unfortunately, however, he hasn't the wit or style or inventiveness to outrage. Ferreri is the kind of clumsy film maker whose deadeningly literal style could turn even the grossest affront into a piddling bromide.

La Grande Bouffe (The Big Feast) ought, at least, to have been in bad taste, but it is in no taste at all. When the film was shown earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, it provoked bitter arguments and a few fistfights. It must have been a slow year. The only curious thing about La Grande Bouffe is that, dealing with such subject matter, it turns out to be so thoroughly insipid.

It is graphic enough and features, besides several odd sexual couplings, scenes of vomiting, diarrhea and other indelicate interludes. None are very pleasant, but none are really disturbing either, because Ferreri is not using them for any other purpose except would-be shock. He does not deal in satire that could threaten or amuse, that could give the sequences substance and, therefore, true impact. His careful chronicle of the dietary excesses of four men is like a prank--a loud, bad practical joke. The men--Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret--hole up in an old house to eat themselves to death, to kill themselves with the very staff of life. Along the way, they also enjoy the company of some whores and a pudgy schoolteacher (Andrea Ferreol), who dispenses her fatty favors equitably and withstands the dietary assault better than any of the men.

Whatever symbolic or ideological potential the story of La Grande Bouffe might have had, whatever opportunity for Swiftian outrage or the savage surrealism of a Bunuel, is extinguished by Ferreri's obstinate insensitivity. It could conceivably be argued that the film is a metaphor for the fate of a society sated by its own prosperity, obsessed by its own comforts. It is difficult, however, to credit such subtleties to a director whose idea of a good visual pun is a man holding a turkey between his legs while a woman cuts the squealing bird's head off with an ax. Ferreri's other sight gags include a couple rutting around in pastry batter and a toilet exploding, inundating everyone in the vicinity with excrement. Much is alien to a sensibility like that, although little is beneath it.

-- J.C.

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