From the Excessive to the Minimal
WEIL, HENRY
FROM THE EXCESSIVE TO THE MINIMAL BY HENRY WEIL The Grande Bouffe (Le Big Joke) four menmarcello Mastro-ianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret, and Ugo TognazziAgree to commit suicide by eating...
...Moreover, the four metaphorically pass on their style of living to the next generation by indulgently guiding a group of school children through the estate...
...From run-down Oldsmobiles to reconstructed jalopies, the means of transportation help to define the person: The boy who has won a Moose scholarship to an Eastern college drives a practical, plodding, second-hand Citroen...
...The chef replies in an untranslatable pun: "La vie est la faice...
...Regrettably, The Grande Bouffe is itself merely stuffing looking for a turkey...
...what is never explained is why the four men decided to commit suicide in the first place...
...We are all animals, Ferreri is saying, living a brutish and disgusting existence...
...Their frequent barking serves as an off-stage chorus of sorts, and when the butcher leaves his last delivery in the yard, they feast upon it, just as the humans would have done...
...Characterization is never more than suggested, and apparent inconsistencies (like the scholarship boy engaging in petty theft, or the hot-rodder rescuing the Toad from a street fight) are never adequately explained...
...He loves the art, the stuffed birds, the whores...
...Its value for its creator is difficult to assess...
...For those to whom Edsels and anklets are redolent with meaning, it will provide a satisfactory, if leisurely, experience...
...Never once is the viewer brought jarringly into the present (period cars, for instance, always stretch as far as the eye can see...
...Lucas has even shot his film in a wide-screen, nearly cinemascopic frame, using a deliberately grainy stock with incomplete color saturation, to make the movie look 10 years old...
...The graffito, of course, lacks plot, development and complex characterization: and it remains anonymous, even when signed, since it is the narrowest of artistic vehicles, offering no room for personal expression...
...Indeed, his film stresses the proximity of animalism to civilization...
...Nor does the film make a meaningful social statement...
...barf" for vomit...
...George Lucas' first film was the science fiction fantasy THX 1138, as a conspicuous and omnipresent license plate will remind you throughout American Graffiti...
...j^^^ ucas accurately depicts the role of the automobile in the teenage culture of the early '60s, and he is sensitive to other features of the period...
...What story there is describes the tribulations of two boys on the last night of summer, before they are supposed to go off to college...
...When an anonymous blonde tools by in a white Thunder-bird, she is immediately assumed to embody the stylishness and value of her car...
...The problem is that despite the images and the visual symbolism, Ferreri is not really disgusted by the preoccupations he displays...
...And as they consume meal after gargantuan meal, they practice ballet, or play the piano, or cavort with a clutch of prostitutes...
...So at the same time that one's appetite is being destroyed by the immensity of the nonstop platters, one is struck by the cuisine's undeniable beauty and delectability...
...The rites of youth take place in cars...
...The four gourmands proceed to their respective ends in a secluded Parisian mansion filled with antique bric-a-brac, paintings and stuffed birds...
...His dialogue captures the slang of a decade ago with little strain: "zits" for acne blemishes...
...consequently, makes no coherent esthetic statement, except perhaps that excess will kill you...
...FROM THE EXCESSIVE TO THE MINIMAL BY HENRY WEIL The Grande Bouffe (Le Big Joke) four menmarcello Mastro-ianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret, and Ugo TognazziAgree to commit suicide by eating themselves to death...
...Directed and coauthored by George Lucas, it ultimately tells us less than we want to know...
...a character attempting to renege on the pact by driving off in an ancient Bugatti freezes to death behind the wheelhis abortive flight, in other words, leads inevitably to death, too...
...The homeliest boy in class is called "the Toad...
...But both we and the characters already knew that...
...Though one of the men is a judge, his three friends have only tenuous connections to the middle class: One is a commercial airline pilot, another a Parisian chef, the third a television salesman...
...Ferreri also includes a wealth of symbolism to suggest the lineaments of human life: The suicides take a cycle of the seasons to complete...
...To go from the excessive to the minimal, a graffito is a brief slash of communication that may range in content from a crude pictograph of genitalia to a gem of maverick wit, like that discovered and appropriated by Edward Albee, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf...
...If we are to disapprove of individuals for lacking social responsibility, we should be shown a society they ought to be responsible to...
...There, rapturous contemplation of futuristic objects overpowered the plot...
...There is nothing in Last Tango in Paris, for instance, that cannot be seen here...
...Although a dance is going on at the local high school that evening, it is worth only a brief once-over from these automotive adolescents...
...The film sacrifices believability for cinematic spectacle, toofirst in a sequence featuring an outrageous antipolice prank, and then in an automobile catastrophe out of which the passengers emerge unscathed...
...the mechanic who has accomplished very little in his life owns the fastest, "meanest" car in town...
...Besides focusing on bodily functions, it shows dogs wandering freely about the grounds...
...Its value for an audience will in general depend upon how fully that audience's background duplicates the creator's...
...The limits of graffiti are the limitations of American Graffiti, a carefully made movie that sets out to portray what it was like to be an adolescent in California in 1962...
...Still, Ferreri intends more than mere Dadaist scandale, for he surrounds his characters (whose names are the same as the actors playing them) with the kinds of selfish diversions all of us supposedly employ to make our lives palatable...
...The clothing and hairstyles in his film are exactly right, and the nostalgic details he emphasizes spinners on hubcaps, carhops on roller skates, cigarettes stored in shirt sleevesAre well-chosen...
...At one point in the movie, the judge asks why there is no stuffing for his turkey...
...It certainly cannot be considered a tract against the bourgeoisie...
...Basically, though, the film shows teenagers "cruising" the city streets, driving back and forth over the same territory until well after dawn...
...This movie, while far superior, is similarly unbalanced...
...In short, Ferreri has evolved a clever conceit he does not genuinely believe in, and The Grande Bouffe...
...Fortunately, the four film stars are all pleasant people to spend a movie with, because author-director Marco Ferreri is determined to be as revoltingly explicit about our bodily processes as the censors will allow...
...Passengers change cars, drivers exchange mockeries and challenges, everyone moves constantly, seeking distraction, chasing identitiesAll to the steady accompaniment of radios blaring out rock-'n'-roll...
...But for those to whom the pop-culture trivia of 1962 carries no resonance, American Graffiti will be simply one more film that recounts the triumphs and humiliations of adolescence, taking its place alongside Summer of '42, Class of '44, The Last Picture Show, Le Souffle au Coeur, Making It, Jeremy, and so on and so on...
...It does not...
...Yet his effort has been one-sidedly aimed at assembling and contemplating these cultural artifacts, and American Graffiti is fundamentally compromised by its implicit assumption that detail piled upon detail amounts to a total film...
...riding shotgun" for sitting next to the driver of an automobile...
...the setting is a house where one of the men lived as a child...
...In particular, he adores the gourmet concoctions, fancifully and lavishly created by Fauchon's, the most elevated delicatessen in Paris, and he lets his camera linger affectionately upon them...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 20
