I Would Like to See It: La Grande Bouffe

It’s impossible to overstate how sexy Andréa (Andréa Ferréol) is in Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe. She’s a cheerfully vulgar angel of death, red-cheeked and Rubenesque, constantly overflowing dresses and brassieres as she demands to be fed, to be spoiled, to be fucked. She is in such sharp contrast to the melancholic excesses of her fellow gourmands, a group of friends gathered at the walled estate of one of their number with the express intent of eating themselves to death, that her unselfconscious raunchiness seems almost pure, unspoiled by the malaise of bourgeois decadence. The film’s central metaphor for overconsumption may be crass and tired, its politics bound up in fatphobia, but there’s something undeniably liberating in seeing her body touched, adored, used as something fully human.

Her lover Marcello’s (Marcello Mastroianni) petulant declaration that she is “too fat” after he suffers erectile dysfunction further complicates the political context in which the film places fatness. Only moments before, Marcello had kneaded the soft flesh of her belly with tenderness and lust, and the retreat’s entire purpose is for its participants to gorge to the point of annihilation. Chef and pâtissier Ugo (Ugo Tognazzi) uses the curve of her generous ass as the imprint for a tart baked in her honor. Alone among the diners, she never sickens nor grows listless. Nor does she eat mechanically, but always with visible pleasure. As a schoolteacher, invited to the morbid retreat by chance, she represents the largely unseen proletariat, a newcomer to excess not yet left jaded by a life of privilege and leisure.

In a film so visually cramped, every frame cluttered with pointless bric-a-brac, every table groaning under the weight of nauseatingly rich meals, Andréa’s vigor and languorous ease are an interestingly ambiguous note. Does she represent the class-climbing petit bourgeois? The point at which the sex and death drives meet and interpenetrate? She gives the kiss of death to every one of the film’s main characters, though it’s never openly acknowledged. Is she perhaps the spirit of joyous hedonism uncoupled from the corrupt enterprise of capitalist consumption? A kind of Dionysian creature, her appetites separate from ennui or conspicuous consumption. After all, the want of the film’s other characters is more an antithesis to desire than desire itself, a drive to end all sensation in a numbing tidal wave of sensual endeavor. The others eat, but only Andréa, fat and soft and wild, is truly hungry.