The Big Feast

Four men and one woman gather for a weekend in a suburban villa to devote themselves to eating and sex. The four friends—pilot Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), gastronome Michel (Michel Piccoli), TV producer Philippe (Philippe Noiret), and judge Ugo (Ugo Tognazzi)—invite schoolteacher Andrea (Andrea Ferreol) and a couple of prostitutes to join them. For these gourmets, lavish dishes are meant to help them achieve ultimate orgasms. Thus, this so-called “gastronomic seminar” turns into a prolonged orgy of gluttony and naked sex—quite literally.

Italian director Marco Ferreri’s film La Grande Bouffe (The Big Feast) stirred considerable controversy in its time. This satire of consumer society, bordering on the grotesque, had a similar impact in the 1970s to what Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L'Age d'Or (1930) did decades earlier.