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Rating:
In all the films I've seen by Ferreri, he has always communicated to me a sense of discomfort, almost of disgust and annoyance: I believe that's what he wants to achieve in us viewers, shaking us out of our certainties and showing us the boredom, futility, and vulgarity that today's human being can reach.
Giovanni (Gerard Depardieu), a young engineer with a child to raise, meets Valeria (Ornella Muti) at the kindergarten, his son's teacher, and it's love at first sight. She leaves her boyfriend (Michel Piccoli) and they move in together.
The initial and erotic euphoria of the couple quickly fades, leaving a succession of arguments, encounters, escapes, reconciliations, misunderstandings, rekindled flames... where Ferreri shows us with all his sardonic laughter the conflict with a phallocentric Male, who is valued only based on his sex, crude, childlike, clumsy, and beastly, who uses women as sexual objects ("What a stupid idea, not to screw. It's hard as a stick, ah...! Moreover, I haven't even slept. Everyone goes to work. And I’m here, on forced vacation.") and the Last Woman, impenetrable both mentally and sexually, claiming her autonomy, her existence, her pleasure ("When do you care about my pleasure? When do you caress me? Only when he needs it. Then, when he's calm, you become moody, get bored, stop talking, want to go elsewhere, to flee, to the sea, to a bar, anywhere.")
These encounters-clashes continue with her who oscillates between Giovanni and her ex and acts as a mother to the little one, and him who tries to dominate her and exert his power through the use of his sex, both with her and with the neighbor's little friend, but facing his failures and Valeria who disqualifies him first (telling him he can't make her experience a real orgasm and that "without it, he is worth nothing") and evades his control, so that Giovanni, now dethroned from his Male throne, emasculates himself with the electric kitchen knife.
The film impresses with its setting: the characters move in one of the new neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris, where among condominiums, supermarkets, and bars, total alienation reigns, concrete oppresses human life, apartments are small cells all identical to each other, and the lawn where Valeria takes the child to play conveys coldness, artificiality.
The photography level of the film seems deliberately low, almost to show us everyday reality, the images are ones we could take even with our cameras, giving a cold, hyperrealist look with an often dark and oppressive setting that places a half-naked Depardieu for half the film with his belly highlighted to underscore his machismo, eating, having sex, belching, swearing, and giving sleeping pills to the child to make him sleep, and Muti, on the other hand, with her sensual and mysterious body saying the child needs cuddles.
The plot itself proceeds without climax or twists but lingers on the continuous circles of the couple, on a non-existent balance and an underlying struggle between the two sexes that on one side pervades with boredom, oppresses and, like all Ferreri’s films, on one side annoys me and on the other keeps me glued in front.
For Ferreri's male, there are no solutions other than self-castration or remaining an eternal child and phallic man.
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