Daily Archives: Tuesday, July 21, 2015

  • La grande bouffe

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Marco Ferreri (1973)

    According to T S Eliot’s Sweeney in ‘Fragment of a Prologue’:

    ‘Birth, copulation and death.
    That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks … ‘

    Marco Ferreri in La grande bouffe adds what might seem to be a fourth essential ingredient – food.  But it soon becomes clear that eating and drinking in the film aren’t really an independent activity.  They are part of, or auxiliary to, sex and death.  A succès de scandale (and winner of the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes) in 1973, La grande bouffe has recently been restored and re-released.   Ferreri and Rafael Azcona, who co-wrote the screenplay with him, tell the story of four middle-aged men, who get together for the weekend, at a villa on the outskirts of Paris.   Their purpose is to end their lives, by gorging themselves to death.   Ugo (Ugo Tognazzi) is a restaurateur and chef, who hates his wife (her brief appearance in the prologue makes clear the feeling’s mutual).  Michel (Michel Piccoli) is a jaded television producer, whose marriage ended some time ago.   Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is an airline pilot, a womaniser dismayed by the onset of impotence.  Philippe (Philippe Noiret) is a judge, and the owner of the villa.  He shares his other home in Paris with the childhood nanny who still treats him like a little boy, except that she also wants sex with him.  The four men are joined for the second night of the weekend by three prostitutes they’ve hired for the occasion and by Andréa (Andréa Ferréol), a young schoolteacher who that morning has brought her class on an educational visit to the grounds of the villa.  (The grounds contain a lime tree – ‘le tilleul de Boileau’, in the shade of which the famous poet is said to have sat, in order to find inspiration.  According to IMDB, La grande bouffe was filmed on location in the Rue Boileau in Paris.)  The prostitutes leave the following morning but Andréa stays for the duration.  She alone survives the weekend.

    A lot gets stuffed into mouths and other orifices in the course of the film’s 135 minutes.  (There’s also a censored version, twelve minutes shorter.)  In a briefly amusing variation on this theme, Ugo does an impression of Marlon Brando in The Godfather and the others laugh.  His characters evidently know what’s on at the pictures and Marco Ferreri must have been well aware of the ‘gastronomic’ cinema of Luis Bunuel:  not only the previous year’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, where the characters, although some of them manage to grab a bit of sex, find their quest for a decent meal repeatedly frustrated and eventually unconsummated;  but also The Exterminating Angel (1962), in which the guests at a posh dinner party find themselves unable to leave it.  (When they do eventually get out, they meet a sticky end.)   The basic scheme of La grande bouffe doesn’t, in the light of these progenitors, seem that original or ‘shocking’.  Since the starting point of the story is that Ferreri’s principals are all intending to commit suicide, the film doesn’t really function either as a satire of over-consumption.  The four men are resolved already to act on feelings of having had too much of life; they recognise overindulgence as a means to its end.  La grande bouffe’s reputation rests on its supposed disgusting exuberance, on Ferreri’s success in continually upping the scatological ante.

    I guess it’s possible that my own appetite for the outrageous has been more than satisfied by decades of cinema since La grande bouffe‘s original release and that I would have found it unprecedentedly and hilariously excessive in 1973, but I doubt it.  The joke isn’t enough to sustain a film well over two hours long, especially if the director is as uninventive as Ferreri is here.  He falls back repeatedly on things like Michel’s serious flatulence problem.  This may be the result of repression (as a child, he was told not to fart) and the noise of his breaking wind may be the longest-lasting of its kind in film soundtrack history.  But this is still a fart joke, as the shit-splattering explosion of a toilet in the villa is still a toilet joke.  The impotent libertine pilot Marcello, having earlier invited a woman to join him ‘in the cockpit’, struggles to get a vintage Bugatti motor to start up.  A fair amount of La grande bouffe is at this level.  Of course, there are plenty of extravagant images too – of sexual as well as gastronomic debauchery, including a good deal of naked flesh, most of it female.   That can no doubt be justified as an expression of the four greedy men’s attitudes towards women although it’s hard not to think of as expressing also the tendency of many male film directors, including art film directors, of the period in which La grande bouffe was made.  (The nearly contemporaneous Last Tango in Paris is an example.)   You might think Ferreri balances things by presenting the men (not the women) as buffoons but I didn’t like this either.  Their creator gives his characters no credit for having thought enough about their lives to decide to end them.

    It’s ironic – how intentionally ironic I wasn’t sure – that the food that appears in the film is its most attractive element.  This is rarely because you want to eat it, more often because of its wittily elaborate, sometimes beautiful design.  Ugo, who naturally prepares most of the dishes, dies eating the triple liver pâté that he’s constructed in the shape of the Dome of Saint Peter’s.  It’s only when it’s being demolished, in both senses of the word, that the food becomes disgusting.  As their names suggest, two of the men are French and two Italian.  Both national cuisines feature on the menu for the weekend and La grande bouffe could be seen as Franco-Italian fusion cooking – as a bawdy Latin perversion of the philosophie of fine dining (there’s at least one reference to the gastronomic essayist Brillat-Savarin) and the adage ‘Il faut manger pour vivre, et non pas vivre pour manger’.  As will also be clear from the above, this is one of those pieces where the characters share names with the actors playing them – something that almost always annoys me because it spuriously suggests a ‘significance’ beyond the story and because it’s lazy.   Philippe, the always-indulged nanny’s boy who’s not up to sexual competition with the other three men and often sulks, is the most clearly-defined character and Philippe Noiret’s dextrous performance is the only one in the film that gives any real pleasure.

    15 July 2015

  • Free Men

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Les hommes libres

    Ismaël Ferroukhi (2011)

    Tahar Rahim’s looks sometimes remind me of Rafael Nadal but it’s hard to fault him otherwise.  An instinctive actor, he’s exceptionally good at playing men who act on instinct.  As in A Prophet, his character in Free Men develops, through une éducation endurcissante, from an impulsive, detached youngster into a grown-up engaged with a cause and capable of cold-blooded homicide to further it.  Rahim’s face, which has an inchoate quality in the early stages of the film, expresses his character’s growth into guarded single-mindedness; he looks momentarily baffled by what’s happening to or around him but he’s evidently quick on the uptake.  He registers thoughts and feelings which the audience can pick up but which wouldn’t be noticed by the people with whom his character is sharing the screen.  In the course of Free Men, Rahim’s Younes, an Algerian immigrant in Nazi-occupied Paris, is transformed from an apolitical street hustler into a member of the French resistance.  Younes’ journey starts when political significance is thrust upon by the Vichy government police:  they arrest Younes for his black market activities and release him in exchange for his agreeing to spy on comings and goings around the city’s mosque.  It’s in the course of this snooping that Younes – encouraged by his already politically committed cousin Ali, attracted to a young woman in the resistance called Leila, and impressed by Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, the haut fonctionnaire who is the director of the mosque – starts to think about what he’s doing, and joins the Free French liberation movement.

    Younes, as the closing credits make clear, is essentially a fictional character, meant to represent many young men of his generation and nationality.  The other two main characters in Free Men are based on real-life individuals – Ben Ghabrit, who died in the mid-1950s, and the Jewish Salim Halali, a famous interpreter and promoter of the arabo-andalouse music of North Africa (he died as recently as 2005).   As Ben Ghabrit, Michael Lonsdale is masterly, as always:  the professional face that he presents to the Vichy French authorities only just disguises Ben Ghabrit’s contempt for them – you feel his amusement and their exasperation with that.  Lonsdale gets over Ben Ghabrit’s wily expertise but also the physical strain it must have been for an elderly man to conceal the extent of the activities that he was supervising:  Jews are being kept hidden in the basement of the mosque.   Mahmud Shalaby as Salim has a beautiful voice (I assume he does his own singing) and a beautiful face (a more masculine one than the real Salim, on the evidence of the latter’s photograph on Wikipedia).  Shalaby’s good looks are more pictorial than Tahar Rahim’s but the two complement each other well.  Farid Larbi is very good as Ali but Lubna Azabal as Leila uses her eyes too deliberately – you notice this particularly when she’s exchanging meaningful looks with Rahim, whose expressions are so economically incisive.  Christopher Buchholz (as a senior German military man) and Bruno Fleury (as the police inspector who recruits Younes) make their characters credible, much more than standard baddies.

    I was feeling pretty ill when I saw Free Men – l thought of walking out and was relieved when it was over.  But this was nothing to do with the movie, which is tautly directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi and has a good screenplay by him and Alain-Michel Blanc.  Although the development of the main themes of this film d’apprentissage isn’t especially imaginative, those themes are strong ones, not least because of the historical ironies they present at this distance in time.   In occupied France, North African Jews can disguise themselves as Muslims.  (Although I didn’t understand a scene in which a Nazi officer satisfies himself that Younes isn’t a Jew by inspecting his genitals – aren’t Muslims likely to be circumcised too?)  Ferroukhi also suggests that Algerian immigrants fighting for the liberation of France had in their minds the future liberation of their native land from French colonial rule.  This idea resonates because of what actually happened in the years post-1945, even if Ferroukhi presents it perhaps too explicitly:  the group of men that Younes joins don’t just make these connections in their heads – they chant, ‘Down with fascist oppression, down with colonialism’ (or words to that effect).  One or two sequences are staged a bit too obviously – for example, when Salim is arrested just as he’s preparing to accompany an older arabo-andalouse performer whom he reveres and has long wanted to sing with.  More often, though, Ferroukhi delivers the big moments convincingly as well as excitingly – like the moment in a cemetery when Salim’s claims to the Vichy that he’s a Muslim are substantiated, and his life is saved, by the miraculous appearance of an inscription on a gravestone there.  The climactic sequence in which an anonymous barge carrying Jews to safety sets off from the Seine is gripping and effective in its description of the escape of many and the staying put, to further the Free French campaign, of the leading man. The good dramatic score is by Armand Amar.

    30 May 2012

     

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