Tweet

La Grande Bouffe (aka Blow-Out), the film for which Ferreri is best-known outside of his native Italy, is one of the most extraordinary European films of the 1970s. Opening the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, it polarized critics and immediately aroused intense controversy - which no doubt helped it become one of the highest-grossing French films of the decade. The film details the pact made between four bourgeois men (pilot, chef, magistrate and TV producer), all bound by their love of food, who retreat to a villa on the outskirts of Paris in the company of three prostitutes, there to gorge themselves to death on food and sex. Made two years before Pasolini's harrowing Salò, Ferreri and screenwriter Rafael Azcona create a loose reworking of Sade's '120 Days of Sodom'. However, Pasolini's ferocity is here replaced by a sly, cynical, Buñuelian humour. An unforgettably savage attack on consumerism and the carnal indulgences of the bourgeoisie, the film sees all four men feed themselves until their bodies can take no more. Since its release the film has lost little of its shock value.

 

Pasquale Iannone on 9th June 2006
View all 52 of Pasquale Iannone's reviews