To die for

La Grande Bouffe (The big feast)

(1973)

Back to Netflix after another 3-month vacation (my available DVR space is over 30% now, thank you), and my return rental is on the recommendation of a friend I met on the train after my most recent M4; thanks, Yana--you were right: I needed to see this.

But good golly--this ain't exactly your run-of-the-mill joyful food and sex flick, is it? If you labeled it, I guess you'd have to label it a comedy (or at least a tragicomedy), and the food does indeed look gorgeous, but it's really the antithesis of the dining-table-as-altar films like Babettes gæstebud and Big Night and Tampopo and Como agua para chocolate: here the music of the kitchen (and of the bedroom--or garage, or sculpture garden, or wherever the coupling happens) is a dirge. Think 130 minutes of Mr. Creosote.

Moreover, with all the farting, the grotesque plumbing breakdown, the dessert-related sex, and a trick with a Bugatti carburetor that puts a whole new twist on the concept of auto-eroticism, you'd think it was a contemporary American movie for teenage boys. And yet it works, mostly, to the credit of four of the best European actors of our time, Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret, and Ugo Tognazzi.