La Grande Bouffe (Blow-Out) (Blow Out) (1973)

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  March 21, 2012

  bookmunki

  Dark and grotesque, just like Ferreri.

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  February 22, 2012

  366weirdmovies

  Four men, one of whom is a master chef, check into a villa and resolve to eat themselves to death. It's THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL meets LEAVING LAS VEGAS. Grotesque but oddly compelling, thanks to a dream cast including Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Picolli and Philippe Noiret.

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  October 31, 2009

  matertenebraum

  The European arthouse movie, since the 50s at least, has been generally seen in opposition to Hollywood. Instead of relying on cartoonish genre, broad comedy and loud, violent action, it supposedly offers analysis, detail, character, critique, context, civilised intelligence. Cru... read moredely put, Hollywood appeals to the senses, European films to the mind.
  
  LA GRANDE BOUFFE is an almost archetypally European movie - a Franco-Italian co-production, directed by a noted auteur, Marco Ferreri, and starring arguably the three greatest of all European actors, Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli and Phillipe Noiret. It features allusions to philosophy, art history and literature, and is confined, Bunuel-like, to the single set of a decaying town mansion. It is also about four middle-aged men stuffing themselves to death, blocking toilets until they messily explode, and, er, breaking wind.
  
  Ferreri treats his theme of excess - food, sex, self-pity - with an almost Oriental restraint, matching lengthy, static long shots so dense with detail and so darkly lit that it's often difficult to make anything out, to extreme close-ups, pitilessly exposing yet also strangely moving: a bit like Ozu filming Fellini.
  
  It's hard to know how to recommend this film - and I do, very strongly. Four professionals - a cook, a pilot, a TV producer and a judge - convene at the latter's unused mansion to spend a weekend non-stop eating a prodigiously elaborate feast made from the choicest meats: many prospective meals are walking about in the garden.
  
  We gradually learn that they have come here to die, but Marcello is unable to continue without sex, so they hire some prostitutes, as well as inviting a local, seemingly innocent, teacher, who is soon revealed to have appetites equal to any of the men. And so the men eat. And eat. And eat. They sometimes have sex, watch antique 'erotic' slides, drive cars, get sick. But mostly they eat. They even have competitions to see who can eat the fastest.
  
  This, ironically, does not sound very appetising for the viewer. There is no narrative drive for instance - any conflict possibly brought by the pure, innocent Andrea, a symbol of life in an atmosphere of decay, to whom Phillipe proposes marriage, are quickly dashed by her own taste for depravity. The men decide to die, and we watch them do it. The film begins with a methodical introduction to all four characters, and ends as methodically picking each one off.
  
  So what is the film about? Is it an allegory - a group of fairly representative French bourgeois gathered in a knackered mansion with a sparse, dying garden, might suggest so. But an allegory of what? The decline of French masculinity, patriarchy, capitalism? The judge and TV producer especially are examples of the most powerful, potentially corrupting forces in Western society, the law and the media. The women all escape and survive, although the closing shot of Andrea returning to the home is highly ambiguous.
  
  BOUFFE is very Bunuellian, from the EXTERMINATING ANGEL-like idea of bourgeoisie trapped in a mansion (figured in the inability of Marcello to leave in his sportscar, doomed to drive up and down the avenue), to the profusion of animals, observing the men's descent into bestiality, as they grunt and hoot and growl, and become fatal slaves to their appetites. Is it a study in decadence - there are many shots framed like grotesque parodies of Renaissance paintings; that optimistic project is flatulently shot here. There are allusions made to both Boileau - the father of French neo-classicism - and Brillat-Savarin, whose Physiognomy of Taste is a famous combination of philosophy and gastronomy which the four men take to nihilistic limits. Is it a death knell of film, as the parody of Don Corleone suggests, as four old men watch slides like a corruption of early cinema?
  
  I don't know. But for me the pleasures were many. The home itself, stuffed with so much bric-a-brac you can barely make out the characters. The fragmentary motifs returning in the coolly formal style - the replaying of certain scenes and shots; the repetition of the inchoate, beautiful, yearning tango music, which is connected to one character but shifts as he becomes a ghost. The museum of the dead culminating in the extraordinary, triangular shot of the sprawled Ugo, with Marcello and Michel behind him. The limitless, ingenious, grotesque variations on sex and food. The gross comedy. The genius compositions. The colours. The sight of three actors who have starred in some of the 20th century's supreme artistic achievements running from faecal rivers, and putting the rump back into rumpo.

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• 
  
  March 26, 2012

  fb1142797643

  "La Grande Bouffe" ("The Big Feast") is grandly overlong, considering it devotes 130 minutes to what amounts to a one-line plot (four men set out to eat themselves to death). This strange Marco Ferreri project gets labeled a black comedy, but where are the laughs? Beyond some spe... read morectacular fart jokes (the sound effects are strikingly realistic), this is a film centered on discomfort rather than humor.
  
  Certainly, the cast isn't the problem. The esteemed Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi play, respectively, a pilot, a TV host, a judge and a chef who meet one weekend at a country estate. But their cheerful getaway seems more and more peculiar, once time passes and we realize that the gang just never stops eating. Endless consumption of presented gourmet dishes accounts for most of the movie. So, unless you're keen to spend two hours watching some fine actors gnaw on every sort of greasy, gloppy, sticky food imaginable (do bread or vegetables appear onscreen at all?), expect to become reacquainted with your gag reflex. Even the sex scenes (naturally, the guys hire some female companions) are mechanical and unappealing.
  
  The film's repulsion factor would be more forgivable if the characterizations were solid. But these also disappoint. Little explanation is offered for the suicidal bent of these otherwise successful men. Their interest in prostitutes and free love suggests a parallel between their sexual and gastronomic appetites, but the script doesn't dig beyond this idea's surface. Luis Bunuel could have done better.

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  March 22, 2005

  gator681

  [font=Century Gothic][color=purple]"La Grande Bouffe" is a French/Italian movie from 1973 about four successful middle-aged men - a judge, television star, chef and airline pilot - who get together for one weekend in an ancient chateau to eat and eat and eat some fabulous dishes.... read more And because he cannot go more than ten minutes without having sex, the airline pilot convinces his friends to call in some prostitutes...[/color][/font]
  
  [font=Century Gothic][color=#800080]Now that basic plot(minus the sex, of course) reminds me of the recent documentary, "Super Size Me", wherein Morgan Spurlock decides to live for a month simply on McDonalds and films the damage this is doing to him. Now I have not seen and have no wish to see "Super Size Me" because it does not satisfy my two conditions to see a documentary: 1) Is it about a subject that I'm interested in? & 2) Can I learn something or glean some insight? I eat fast food, I know it's not good for me and the point being? I have free will that allows me to do something that may not be healthy for me.(Like smoking for example which I don't like but I'm not about to tell smokers what I think of it.) In a more extreme fashion, the characters in "La Grande Bouffe" are enjoying a weekend in a manner I would not act on. But sometimes, a filmmaker will make a movie about characters who act in a way we do not approve of.[/color][/font]
  
  [font=Century Gothic][color=#800080]"La Grande Bouffe" is perhaps one or two wrong moves away from being a gross-out comedy but it is saved from this ignoble fate by a dream cast(Marcello Mastrioanni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Phillippe Noiret). Also, the characters being middle-aged lends a sense of mortality to the proceedings.[/color][/font]

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  October 28, 2008

  jimbotender

  I love the sickness of this movie in accordance to one deliciously made,let's say burger.Craving for abundance isn't similar with desire for equilibrium,vanity soon comes and she's definitely uninvited...

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  November 29, 2010

  RicC

  I read the synopsis wrong, thinking the characters would literally eat themselves cannibal-style, but instead it's about an annual morbid pigout between four forty-somethings. Exciting - I know. So I unfairly pitted it against a false image, but the film is still terribly sterile... read more on its own. With the characters as lard factories, I would expect the binge-eating premise to escalate out of its repetitiveness, as well as its sexual content, which is pathetic and underwhelming for a European film. Marcello Mastroianni is an official douche bag for choosing to be in damn stupid movies only. If you can pick up what the purpose of this film was, more to you, because it's lacking in events, emotion and any style worthy of discussing.

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  March 8, 2010

  sleepykiss

  A strange, dark & depressing comedy about getting old, dreams & dying. Kind of a combination of SALO & THE COOK THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER. Luv MM always.

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• 
  
  January 14, 2010

  Chapsky

  An original and intellectual work! But there is not an hidden or a direct message as I see. Just a surreal way of searching the limits of hedonism. Yeah it's as surreal as Un chien andalou or the Eraserhead. And the film is still keeping its impressiveness on human psychology. So... read moreme scenes were so disturbing and I did not want to eat anything in next 10hrs related to that. A must see classic for art lovers.

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• Michel Piccoli as Michel
• Marcello Mastroianni as Marcello
• Ugo Tognazzi as Ugo
• Philippe Noiret as Philippe
• Andrea Ferreol as Andrea
• Monique Chaumette as Madeleine
• Florence Giorgetti as Anne

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• In which controversial 1973 film do four men eat themselves to death?  Answer »

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