Belly, shit, death the critic Vincent Teixeira at the time of the release of The Great Food 1973. Choice of unwarranted qualifiers to triangulate the project of this out-of-standard feature film. After blowing a wind of scandal on the Croisette, comedy acid of Marco Ferreri gradually obtained the status of true cult film. Now available on MUBI in a magnificent restored version, it was worth (re)thinking about this inescapable cinema punching...
Gastronomic orgy and punk cinema
Four friends – Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi, designated by their real names – leave their respectable companions and lives to lock up in a mansion, with the aim of playing for a "gourmet seminar". Each one cloistered in frustrations outlined by the film, they abandon themselves together to an orgy where sex, food and annihilation seem more linked than ever.
A veterinary student and then a warrior documentary student with the greatest of the time, Marco Ferreri sign with The Great Food his most famous film. However, he enjoys a rich filmography, resulting from a fertilized soil with a critical look to bring closer to Buñuel, and a taste for the scandal where Eros often gets married to Thanatos. He will also be an actor, particularly in the Porchery (the opportunity to listen again below the master Porchery inspired by Pasolini but version Berurier Noir and his sweet dedication to the National Front) by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and won the prize of international criticism in Cannes in 1973, ex-aequo with Mom and the fucking by Jean Eustache. In short, a really good career, far from the label of agitator and vulgar filmmaker that a whole part of the criticism has kindly attributed to him at a time... Anyway, real punk movies!
Sad comedy
Four companions lock the door of a villa with dissatisfaction in their lives, allowing only a promise of tasteful pleasure and lust. Squashed by this getaway between the boys, The Great Food Getting into a hallucinating car sequence with this iconic profile plan, where the four stage animals meet in front of their manor.
Yet, very quickly we understand that something is rotten in their project. That it is enough to press a little so that the juice of the putrefaction appears and cracks this glazed glazed perfection. And these are not the sources of pleasure that these four gentlemen let into their home – the rutilante Bugatti and its mechanical ronron, the mischievous and vaporous night-end, a curious teacher, played by the genius Andrea Ferréol, and finally the cargo of food – which will help them pursue their vicious dream.
For while the stubborn piano notes composed by Philippe Sarde and performed by Piccoli tint the film with a foretaste of death, Ferreri plays with his frame to better drown his characters in asphyxiating light obscurs, constant overcasts just as claustrophobic and a granular and tinted winter photograph, splendid but already blooming good the corpse.
And an infinite sadness will mingle with the strange funnyness that glazes the first half of this Great Food. Piccoli declaming Shakespeare by holding a head of decapitated pork at the end of his arm, Piccoli vainly trying to share his boudin while the hour is more at coffee and orange juice, Piccoli – still – declaming his Latin aphorisms and his metaphysical considerations that would make us lorgen on the side of the Bébel de A Bout de vente…
« Apart from the food, everything is epiphenomena! The sand, the beach, the ski, the love, the work, your bed: epiphenomena! »
And out of breath, they will be more and more. In a race to death. A systematic sape job. Self-gavage until too full. The film then becomes physiological – as Ferreri himself says – until it embarks its spectator on a show that takes decisively to the guts. A death party. The oxymoric association of these two concepts allows The Great Food not just a great-guignolesque fable, but to become a violent pamphlet against the bourgeois class.
The bourgeois in the fire!
Indeed, by keeping with the description of these first paragraphs, one could believe in a tragic film about these four souls in pain pushed to culinary suicide. This is not the case, thanks to Ferreri's setting up of a rather brief parallel characterization of our quartet of protagonists at the beginning of the film – as Friedkin did at the beginning of the film. Sorter A few years later. Segments that portray men in complete possession of their means: a recognized pilot, a media magnate, a great chef and a magistrate. All belong to the bourgeois class, all are rich, all check all the boxes of a position of total domination.
Beyond a simple critique of the consumer society put forward by some critics, Ferreri advances the pawns of a vitriol bully against this decadent bourgeois class, to whom everything belongs and who is content to waste before rotting on the spot. A parasitic class that has already irrigated the acerbic pan of Pasolini's late filmography, and that appears in The Great Food in his worst light. No wonder when it was released in Cannes, the film was sent down by the majority of the critics who were supposed to be in front of a very unpleasant mirror of his own caste.
« Scandalizing is a right, being scandalized, a pleasure. Anyone who refuses the pleasure of being outraged is a moralist blemish. »
Seeing rich, violent, powerful men, sometimes masturbated by sexual predatory behaviour, sometimes of barely bearable sufficiency, tearing on their own fate while continuing to depreciate, this is the real spectacle offered by Ferreri. A suicide as pathetic as it is distressing, a class that grabs everything and manages to complain. A suicide turned into a fat, unpredictable fair, masturbated with flatulence, vomit splashes and shit explosion. And if none of them is fooled by what's going on in this mansion, it doesn't stop them from continuing to enjoy in their shadows and getting to die of it. The man is nothing but an animal – the film also organizes a strange pull of dogs as he moves forward, all as attracted to food and shit as the protagonists of the The Great Food – animated by his reptilian brain with an ever more impulseal need.
And this notion of disconnected and parasitic elite class is only more supported by the constant deconstruction of any notion of utility. The revered Blue Bugatti will only serve Marcello to get mossed by hearing his motor roaring, which will never lead him beyond the garden where he will make incessant come-and-go, both ridiculous and vain. A bike on the roof of this master house will be attached to a central arm that will force him to turn round. Even ubiquitous sex and food will be perfectly detached from any notion of pleasure, yet inherent in the pleasures of the flesh/shelf. In short, everything in this bourgeois daily seems to be decoupled from practical notions to be overlaid in the superfluous and the most total sterility.
Bourgeoisie incestuous rush
We could say The Great Food as a remedy to the liberals of all hairs excited to the notion of runoff, because it demonstrates it indeed: the bourgeois class is indeed running, but of its own viciated fluids coming to fertilize vertically their equally parasitic offspring. Between Michel Piccoli tending to his daughter the key to his apartment in gesture of ultimate nepotism, and this grabatary butler whom we gladly dismiss as soon as its usefulness is no longer felt, we feel that the bourgeois manna turns in a closed vase.
An idea of a world apart, parallel and waterproof, taken up by the incestuous metaphor that points the tip of his nose with the character of Philippe, and which will then be deployed more frontally in the less awesome (and just as critical) not less. Society Brian Yuzna in 1989, especially in his final as shocking as fierce.
Big news food?
If one can grin teeth as to a dated representation of the homosexual impulses of a character or of the figuration of women, both well in the jus of their time, there is no doubt that the basic message of The Great Food is more current than ever. With profits reaching historical levels in 2023 – it is hard to articulate the figure of $68.7 billion in dividends paid to shareholders by 40 French companies – decidedly, their big food seems to have just begun... In parallel, the progressive dismantling of all scaffolding that supports the social body by a class as complicit as well as arsonist: Ferreri's metaphor seems only more wise than ever.
We then resonate in the head the melancholic and stubborn walk on the piano by Philippe Sarde who glazes the whole feature film, and like Michel Piccoli, we remain well alone with his boudin...
The Great Food, a cult film that does not detract from its aura, to find already on MUBI in a magnificent restored version. And it's not this trailer mounted for the release of the film and crossing a florileg of the most acerbic critics of the time that will convince you otherwise...
Trailer of The Great Food
Subscribe
Connection
0 Remarks
oldest
