LA GRANDE BOUFFE
FranceItaly, 1973
English Title: The Big Feast / Blow-Out
Story: Marco Ferreri. Screenplay: Marco Ferreri, Rafael Azcona. Director of Photography: Mario Vulpiani. Editors: Amedeo Salfa, Claudine Merlin, Gina Pignier. Set Design: Michel de Broin. Music: Philippe Sarde. Cast and Characters: Marcello Mastroianni (Marcello), Ugo Tognazzi (Ugo Baldazzi), Michel Piccoli (Michel), Philippe Noiret (Philippe), Andréa Ferréol (Andréa), Monique Chaumette (Madelaine), Florence Giorgetti (Anne), Rita Scherrer (Anulka), Solange Blondeau (Danielle), Michèle Alexandre (Nicole), Cordelia Piccoli (Barbara). Production: Edmondo Amati, Jean-Pierre Rassam, Vincent Malle, Alain Coiffier for Capitolina Produzioni Cinematografiche, Mara Films, Film 66. Length: 123’
Format: DCP. Source and under licence from: Tamasa.
Original Version. Subtitles: English.
A chef, a TV producer, a pilot and a magistrate are friends who have formed a select gourmet club. Fed up with their boring, unfulfilled lives they arrive at Philippe’s rundown villa for a week-end of feasting and fun, all the while concealing a terrible secret.
“These four enigmatic portraits of four ordinary 1970s upper middle class individuals (a French senior magistrate and choreographer, a pilot and a restaurant owner (Italians) are brilliant. The scarlet, blood-red colours of the French interiors and the deep, blue-grey hues of the outdoor scenes – so that affluence becomes confused with infinite melancholy and conventional opulence assumes the colour of lead – condense around the corrupt flesh of the characters, hinting at their unknowable interior lives. Thus is the whole of the past expressed (in film, the colour of a wall, the glistening blade of a knife, the design of the wing of a stationary aircraft, with a single “expressive” signal can depict all the complexity of a Proustian phrase). Meanwhile, the present is examined through a series of actions which, with their calm de-Sade-like apriorism, develop inexplicably, as if there were an invasion going on: but nothing more. So, depicted in their daily routine on a weekend away, rendered enigmatic by their excess, these characters remain in our hearts, like priests ironically performing some religious ritual (which they hide behind a light-hearted grin and a solemn carnality not devoid of bourgeois vulgarity, an obscure fanaticism which they have mysteriously acquired and has become a permanent feature of the character of each).”
(Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Thursday 7th April 2022, h. 7:00 pm
