LSC Week 13: Movie Nom-Noms Week

My grandfather had a saying that my mom likes to tell me all the time: “It’s not what you eat, it’s what eats you.”

This is a notion that I think is central to Macro Ferreri’s pitch black comedy La Grande Bouffe. The set up reads like the start of a joke: A judge, a TV producer, a chef and an airline pilot get together to eat themselves to death. It is a joke, sure, and at times a pretty funny one, but it’s one that gets to the core of our consumer culture and the gaping void that it leaves in all of us.

“Consumerism is bad, actually” isn’t exactly the most clever observation. But Ferreri gives us an opportunity to see this play out in a visceral, intimate and personal way while couching it in an absurd and shocking series of events that forces you to pay attention. This otherwise morbid affair is presented with a sort of charm and casualness that can be attributed to the stellar cast of the film. Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret, joined in the second act by Andréa Ferréol as a school teacher who is very into these guys idea of a good time, all give fascinating and layered performances. They each give a different layer to the commentary in turn, to the point where I feel like I want to go on and on about each one. I won’t, because I feel like a big appeal to this movie is discovering this stuff as it unfolds, but getting back to my grandfathers saying, you can see it in their eyes. Something is eating these people.

That sense of discovery is everywhere in the film. Both the story and the performers expertly sort of lull you into a false sense of comfort. These are charming people, having what appears to be a really great time eating what appears to be really good food and occasionally fucking each other. For most of the film, this is the sort of weekend you feel like you would want to have. Even before the real reason for the gathering is said explicitly, it feels sexy and exotic and glamorous and a little romantic, but there’s always something in the back of your mind that is telling you something is off.

And in a bit of fun philosophical sleight of hand, you think that it’s the suicidal bits of this that are making you uncomfortable, but it’s not just that is it? It’s that this sort of thing is allowed to happen at all. The sheer glut and waste of it is gross, you know in your bones that no one should be able to do this. No one should have this much in a healthy society. Which is nuts when you consider these aren’t even what you would consider to be mega-rich men. Which is why, I suppose, if these guys were going to consume themselves to death they, at the very least, had the bare minimum human decency not to drag the rest of us in with them. A notion that feels almost quaint with modern retrospect.

The “why” of it all is left a mystery to us. We don’t see how the scheme was concocted, we don’t know whose idea it is, we don’t even see why these men, much less the woman who joins them, decide to go through with it. These people don’t seem all that depressed and their lives aren’t that hard, comparatively speaking. But the “why” doesn’t really matter, does it? What matters is we are watching five people looking for comfort in the very thing that’s killing them. That no matter how much they eat, how much they take in, they are the same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning. And there’s something sort of tragic about that. These are people who are all value in some way, these are people who make things, who shape hearts and minds. But they decided they would rather mutilate themselves trying to fill a void they never can.

In short this is kind of like if The Hangover slowly morphed into Leaving Las Vegas but with so...so much more fecal matter. It would make a killer double feature with Triangle of Sadness, though now that I'm thinking about it. So if you’ve got a strong stomach and a chip on your shoulder for the bourgeoisie this is the one for you.