Genre Country Director Actor

Tales Of Ordinary Madness / Touche Pas A La Femme Blanche

Marco Ferreri, 1974-81

Star Review

Milan-born director Marco Ferreri (1928 - 1997) was undoubtedly one of the most singular and underrated talents to emerge from the landscape of post-war Italian cinema, a cinema still grappling with the legacy of neorealism. Controversial, polemical and endlessly inventive, he was heavily influenced by the master of filmic surrealism Luis Buñuel and his first forays into filmmaking came in Spain during the mid-1950s. Already, in these early films, there are intriguing glimpses into what would become his main thematic concerns: male alienation and the impossibility of communication between the sexes.

If ever a film’s title came close to being a summation of it’s director’s oeuvre, it is Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981). Based on a selection of short autobiographical stories by Charles Bukowski, Ferreri’s 20th feature stars Ben Gazzara as Charles Serking, a hard-drinking poet swimming amongst the down-and-outs in a squalid, soulless LA. His attempts to forge relationships are doomed to whisky-soaked failure. Could the arrival of Cass, a suicidal prostitute (played by Ferreri favourite Ornella Muti) somehow provide redemption?

Ferreri’s caustic anti-Vietnam satire Touche pas à la femme blanche (1973) sees Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn played out in period costume in contemporary Paris. Assembling a stellar Franco-Italian cast including Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi, the film’s wry, unforgiving humour is reminiscent of early Godard. The enfant terrible of the New Wave was in fact a great admirer of Ferreri’s, counting
his 1969 film Dillinger is Dead as one of his favourites.

Pasquale Iannone on 3rd May 2006

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