Italian director Marco Ferreri (1928-1997) having achieved some success in Spain with his dark comedy El Cochecito (The Wheelchair,1959) worked in both his native country and France. His bitter yet elegant commentary on the battle of the sexes would include 1969's Dillinger is Dead and The Last Woman (1976). His critique of the consumer society of the bourgeoisie was implicit with the endless conviviality in Dillinger is Dead, and reached an extreme in La Grande Bouffe (Blow Out,1973) in which four glutinous men gorge themselves to death on what would be their last supper.
His first English language film would come in 1978 with Ciao maschio (Bye Bye Monkey), with a protagonist a la Marcello Mastroianni - a wheezy and wicked professor in a decaying New York of the future. In Tales of Ordinary Madness (1982) Ben Gazzara gives an astute performance as inebriated poet Charles Bukowski a veritable malcontent who yens for love and seems to search for it precisely in all the wrong places. In contrast to the misogynistic overtones of some of Ferreri's earlier works, The Story of Piera (1983) portrayed a liberated working-class woman played by one of Fassbinder and New German Cinema's darlings, Hanna Schygulla while the titular character was conveyed with a gusto via the eternally intense Isabelle Huppert.
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| Everybody's got something to hide except Marco and his monkey. |