“La Grande Bouffe”

Do we live only to gratify ourselves with luxury, food and sex? Looking closely one might say that food, sex and luxury are the three most significant and magnificent diversions from the tediousness of life. Are we not a whole bundle of pleasure-seeking-society?

Well if this is so then here are four urbane characters - a chef, a pilot, a TV producer and a judge, who perhaps having come to realize the emptiness of life, meets at the judge’s inherited mansion with an assignment to gorge themselves to death with great pleasure (and to have sex) – all conceivably to escape the monotony of life.

Talk about ‘gorging oneself to death’ and one has LA GRANDE BOUFFE {1973} which is characteristically a French-Italian European film, directed by Marco Ferreri. It stars Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli,Philippe Noiret and Andrea Ferreol

The film starts as a comedy and ends up tragically. Some may term this as a notorious film with disconcerting content, but the film does not suggest the audience what they should think, something very few films do. It explores isolation, worthlessness, purposelessness, detachedness, hedonism, yearning and escapism.

This film can be seen as an assault on the importance we give to food, sex and luxury as all the central characters attempts successfully to end their life with food, sex and luxury. We undeniably exist in a materialist society and there is no escape from it.

There is over-eating, orgies, living life luxuriously, without thinking of ethics and morals with one single objective – end life. These four characters gorge themselves to death, not metaphorically but literally, while around half the world dies in hunger.


This film may be treated as an exposure to consumerist society or it may be treated as an anti-capitalist endevour. Whatever it may be, but there may not be enough people in the Western World to afford, indulge or allow themselves to such wastefulness, lavishness and excessiveness.

After watching the film the perennial thought crosses the mind to find reasons for living this meaningless, absurd, empty life and to understand why those four characters gorged themselves to death.

Why do we continue supporting a social system which is based on Darwin’s theory of Survival of the Fittest?



Overall the mass audience would be in a state of shock if exposed to such films.


Who wants to die with an overdose of food, sex and high life in a palatial estate?


Either excited or exhausted - The eternal chase goes on …..