La Grande Bouffe

A film set in a villa outside Paris. Four men gather for a weekend. All are middle-aged, all successful in their professions, and all have known each other for years. A pilot, a television producer, a judge and a chef. Supplies arrive at the villa. Lorryloads of meat, game, fish, sauces and sugar; the kitchen is filled from top to bottom. Their purpose is clear. They will eat until they die and they have said so to each other. From there the film consists of scenes at the table. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, night; it goes on without a break. Women arrive. Then all but one leave. Andréa teaches at the local school. She comes out of curiosity, stays, and is with all four of them. The bodies do not hold. Illness, blockage, wind, vomiting and death; the narrative hides none of it and shows it openly. What the narrative is interested in is not food but consumption: the film builds satiety as a form of suicide and offers it as an argument about bourgeois life. The characters carry their own names. The four actors play under their real first names. Its screening at Cannes caused an incident. There were protests in the auditorium, the film was called an insult, and the argument ran for days. The director defended it as a provocation and cut nothing. Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Andréa Ferréol are in the cast. Marco Ferreri directed and co-wrote. Who it is for: anyone who likes the provocative European cinema of the 1970s. Who it is not for: nearly everyone; the film shows bodily functions constantly and directly and it is genuinely hard to sit through.