The Grande Bouffe

The Grande Bouffe

(La Grande Bouffe), Marco Ferreri / I, 1973
French-Italian version / Czech subtitles, 135 min

Subversive Italian satirist Marco Ferreri directed and co-wrote (with Rafael Azcona) this grotesquely amusing French black comedy about four men who grow sick of life, and so meet at a remote villa with the goal of literally eating themselves to death. The quartet comes from various walks of life -- a pilot (Marcello Mastroianni), a chef (Ugo Tognazzi), a television host (Michel Piccoli), and a judge (Philippe Noiret) -- but all are successful men with excessive appetites for life's pleasures (food is used as mere metaphor here, as graphic as that metaphor becomes).