Fifty years have passed since the great feast and we still continue with our eyes fuller than our belly. La Grande Bouffe, a Franco-Italian film directed by Marco Ferreri, was not well received in theaters in 1973 and censorship blocked its viewing for six months, thinking that it would plunge viewers into the sin of gluttony. It was considered scatological, excessive, lascivious and grotesque when it was rather mocking, poignant, uncomfortable and deliciously lavish. The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie by Luis Buñuel had been released a year earlier, winning the Oscar for best foreign film. In this case, the mixture of the real and the dreamlike using the act of eating in a luxurious restaurant as a symbol of the new upper-middle class achieved popular favor. Perhaps, since La Grande Bouffe drank from the same source as the Marquis de Sade's classic work, The 120 Days in Sodom, it provoked an instinctive rejection and accelerated the label of “misunderstood film ahead of its time”. A flagrant euphemism to be able to forget the movie in the catchall without any prize.
Fifty years have passed since the great feast and the anecdote of the visual continues to win the battle against the subtext of the plot. Its protagonists, Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret, decide to get together in a decrepit Parisian mansion with an abandoned garden where animals roam freely. There is no trap or cardboard, since the fictional characters keep their real names. A convincing proof of promoting the veracity of four very different men, but united in the company of suicide out of embarrassment, who apparently celebrate something as universal as friendship, although they know that in the bottomless well of the champagne glasses with which they toast radiates a fierce criticism of the consumer society, an acid analysis of the existential crisis of adulthood and an ode to the lack of faith that withers everything with nostalgia. At full throttle and without brake, the sacrifice of life and death is celebrated. Both at the table and in boredom for the future.
Fifty years have passed since the great feast and, paradoxically, it is still difficult to reluctantly admit that the film is already a cult work, an artifact with a corrosive packaging and extremely current content, that the political correctness of today and now would take care of it. to mutilate until leaving it completely unrecognizable. Because from the great feast to the great fast there is only a belch of difference.
“The great feast still seems to me one of the pinnacles of cinema; from when she didn't have to explain anything or anyone. An exercise in creative freedom unrelated to fashion, fully within the system (it is not an underground film with a cast of strangers) and the closest thing to extreme hedonism, without any alibis”, emphasizes Fausto Fernández, renowned film critic from Fotogramas. , who in his day shared a tablecloth with Ugo Tognazzi, actor, inveterate gourmet and chef in the film, assured him that not only were the actors the authors of most of the dishes, but they actually ate them.
“Of course, the film hasn't aged one iota: it's today's society, today's people, 50 years later, who have aged (very badly). Reviewing Marco Ferreri's film should be mandatory. You watch the film again and it becomes clear to you that beyond a provocative act, what there is is a party of friends where the characters and the actors who play them are more alike than we think”.
This is confirmed by the book The Injester (Contra Mundum, 2022) by Ugo Tognazzi, a translation of the Italian original from 1974, only one year after filming and with all the memories very vivid. It is an “autogastrobiography”, as the bon vivant himself liked to say, which brings together open secrets and mythologized rumors of this great gastronomic and sexual bacchanalia that was filmed to the height of the circumstances. “I want to start by saying that La Grande Bouffe was the most unique, the most exaggerated and the most fantastic experience I have ever had in cinema. Not only because of the atmosphere that was generated, but also because of the very symbolism of the film. Without a doubt, one of the most unique films ever made in which food was a fundamental role in our work as actors, as much as our acting was intrinsically linked to food. And perhaps, directly determined by her”.
Almost instinctively, the four actors realized the strange communion and the unique atmosphere that was breathed during the recording of the first to the last interior sequence. Rafael Azcona's script and Francis Blanche's dialogues left no room for doubt: they were literally going to die wrapped in delicacies, vomit and excrement, in a state of inevitable and unbridled trance. After three days of filming, everything related to the script became secondary, since cooking and improvisation won the game for the most academic execution. Several pages of what was stipulated were torn out to create a climate of communion that was not forced.
“It would be impossible to replicate again. We entered into a friendly competition based on perfectionism and selflessness. We got to a place where each of us cared more about our colleagues' performance than our own. This helped us overcome the barriers that an actor's ego inevitably erects.” And in that shared generosity that Tognazzi defines so well, on many occasions the words were replaced by recipes from a chef from the mythical Fauchon house. Officially, they became actors-cooks or cooks-actors, depending on the order of the factors.
“Our arrival on the set was marked by aromas. Based on the smells saturating the air, we knew what was the fate that awaited us in the scene we were going to shoot (...) At one point, all those aromas coming from the kitchen began to be less pleasant and, with the passage of time, , they became quite nauseating,” recalls Tognazzi. Huge portions of duck and wild boar pâté, shrimp cocktail, aubergine caviar, Niçoise salad, lasagna, borscht soup, baked suckling pig stuffed with chestnuts, mashed potatoes, guinea fowl, osso buco, leg of lamb, Provencal pissaladiera or eccentricities such as a dessert in the shape of a woman's breasts garnished with Bavarian cream or a cake recipe made with a woman's ass while having sex all the time.
Unassumable gargantuan presentations for any human being with a life expectancy, which bordered on the dangerous in cases such as eating oysters until they burst, causing the production team to hire a doctor and a veterinarian. “The vet, to control the oysters at their opening, and the doctor, to control the actors after the binge. My proposal to also summon a jeweler was not taken into consideration, despite the fact that I had high hopes of finding a pearl”, Tognazzi wrote without losing a hint of sense of humor.
A know-how in the culinary arts that would have been a nightmare for any actor without a chef's soul, which became a great honor for Ugo Tognazzi. “Cooking is in my blood. And there, I certainly have red and white blood cells, but also a substantial amount of ketchup. I suffer from acute spaghetti. For me, the kitchen is the most exciting part of the house”. Hence the wall-mounted refrigerator in his house was like his private family chapel. "Act? Sometimes it seems more like a hobby to me. Eating, on the other hand, I do it full time. And he adds the quintessence of love for the chef's trade. “After making dinner, my greatest satisfaction is getting the approval of my friends and tablemates. Now that I think about it, I get something from cooking that I got when I went on stage and that now, with the cinema, I lack: direct contact with the public. Greed and gluttony: silly words, dictated by the current, punitive and masochistic morality. Each one is free to make his own choice, even that of dying stuffed with foie gras ”.
And that's what Ugo Tognazzi did in fiction: he died with his mouth full, one last spoonful ready to swallow, and a final speech filled with Lombard pride. “Let us exhume the epicurean ideals that heralded joy, life, and made the Roman world and the Renaissance great: let us wholeheartedly reconnect with the uninterrupted, secular flow of drool, sperm, and shit; Let's go back, especially when it comes to food, to that place that is becoming increasingly elusive, dotted with armies of preservatives, frozen foods and cans”, the actor declares.
By way of conclusion, the film critic Fausto Fernández tries to decipher why the seventh art has had difficulties to properly honor the most conventional and mundane act of eating without falling into exaggerations. “Perhaps the cinema, selfish in its condition as an act of artistic creation, has always felt more identified with those who cook than with those who eat. Something very curious because, applying these similarities, a film is designed to be 'eaten' by the spectators”.
And he dares to predict what would have happened at this year's Oscar ceremony if La Grand Bouffe was a candidate for the statuette. “The great eater would not have a measly chance to survive in 2023. Sensitive skin and the 'offended' are incapable of not assimilating or understanding, but rather forgive a film that claims to eat, fuck and die without any excuse or message ( moral, sociopolitical...). What's more, a title released this year, such as Ruben Östlund's El triángulo de la tristeza, happens to be provocative and scatological, it doesn't go anymore, the heir to Buñuel or Ferreri himself. It is a conformist, very conservative film that needs to justify everything with an insufferable non-stop message. The big meal is not like that. Fortunately".
