La Grande Bouffe (1973)

La Grande Bouffe arrives from 1973 with a reputation for scandal and a small army of dogs in the final reel. Four bourgeois friends, a chef, a magistrate, a pilot and a television producer, retreat to a villa with the stated intention of eating themselves to death. Marco Ferreri means this as a joke about consumption, and the joke lands with the weight of a collapsed soufflé. The targets are clear enough: the decadence of a class that has everything, wants more, and can think of no better exit than stuffing itself into the cold room. As a critique of appetite dressed up as leisure, it remains briskly effective. Nobody in the villa is poor. That is the point, and the film never lets us forget it.

The social awareness on display is of a piece with its era and its milieu. The cast is uniformly white and European, with a Chinese visitor appearing only long enough to be politely refused. Michel, the television producer, is coded as effeminate, which the film treats as a punchline instead of a character. Women enter the story as prostitutes summoned for the evening, and the one who stays, the schoolteacher Andrea, earns her keep by feeding, bedding and finally finishing off the men. She has presence. She does not have much of a life. The film watches her with the same curiosity it reserves for the pâté.

Bodies here are sites of disgust, not celebration. The film's whole grammar is flatulence, sewage and expanding flesh, so any notion of bodily acceptance is off the menu. Nor does it trouble itself with the climate, with neurodivergence, or with the rewriting of history. Its sermon, if we call it that, is delivered through gluttony and farce instead of a lecture. The result is a film that says something sharp about greed and says it with a whoop. We have seen worse. We have also seen subtler.