Marco Ferreri
La grande abbuffata

It is a fairly well-known principle, even in medicine, that the best way to kill a vital entity (such as a virus or a wart) is to feed it and let it grow until it surpasses its sustainable limit, causing it to collapse to destruction (this also happens to stars, which self-sustain until they die out). All the discussions and debates surrounding the current environmental issues of our planet, if you look closely, revolve around this: the fact that increasing emissions, gas production, and material transformation are altering the globe to the point of its demise. And, moving from the observation of nature to the prescription of moral behaviors, the same classical philosophers warned us not to exceed the limits of moderation, to live in the aurea mediocritas, forgetful of excessive temptations, cultivating the virtue of temperance; as an unaware imitator of those thinkers, Marx in the 19th century predicted the collapse of advanced Anglo-Saxon capitalism under the weight of overproduction, thus opening the doors to the communist revolution.

In its own way, "La grande abbuffata" ('73) by Marco Ferreri encapsulates, in the depiction of four friends who seclude themselves in a house to eat until they die, all the suggestions previously described: on a physical level, those who eat too much will end up bursting; on a moral level, growing excessively distances us from virtue and temperance, bringing our own humanitas to suicide; on a political level, the capitalist society is heading towards a collapse from overproduction. "Bulimia," in short, as a true illness of our time and as a keystone for decrypting the world, with the observation that the one staged by the Milanese director is a deliberate, amused, conscious "bulimia," typical of a human race that, to paraphrase and translate the 1992 Roger Waters, enjoys dying.

That said, rather than breaking a lance in favor of Ferreri, whom I do like and who represented a stinging and courageous film, I prefer to cast a sharp lance against this movie, which I liked a lot the first time I saw it, but found somewhat tiresome upon re-watching, perhaps due to the subtle ideological and moralistic undertones it carries, even though the director declared himself an anarchist: thesis-driven films and stories are fundamentally weak and age quickly, even if the theses they state are brilliant, and sometimes as relevant as "bulimia" as a disease of the contemporary world. This weakness results from the fact that the works tell us very little if read outside the thesis of the director or author, or if decontextualized from the era in which they were released.

The same can be said for "La grande abbuffata," ultimately a sort of game in which four great actors like Tognazzi, Noiret, Piccoli, and Mastroianni engaged with success, yet resulting, however, somewhat distasteful in the depiction of the four debauchees who, mindful of Sade, reveled in decadence, in pleasure until they died from it, yet without inflicting pain on others as the divine marquis foresaw.

A film that does not appear, therefore, classic, but rather, seems to me to have aged poorly, describing the relationship between man-passions-friendship-death in a much less humble, but also less effective manner than the almost contemporary "Amici miei".

Thumbs partially down.