Never Mind the Ballards (Themroc + Weekend) (+ La Grand Bouffe)

 "Themroc (1973) - Claude Faraldo’s subversive satire lacks any intelligible dialogue or music, with a screenplay composed entirely of gestures, grunts, gibberish, moans, and screams. Themroc, a factory worker played by the late Michel Piccoli, goes about his daily existence between his job and the apartment he shares with his mother and sister, until an incident at work pushes him over the edge, causing him to regress to primitive behavior and tear down the wall of his living room—virtually transforming his home into a cave, open to the public." - e-flux

"This is mainly noted for having no intelligible dialogue throughout: given its considerable length (105 minutes) and essential plotlessness, though, the series of grunts, growls, groans and other gibberish uttered by all the characters involved does become wearying after a while. Nevertheless, it's a good example of the risks that film-makers were willing to take (and generally manage to pull off) during this most creative era in World Cinema; curiously enough, for being virtually a Silent film with barely established characters, this has one of the longest cast lists I've ever seen! THEMROC revolves around a laborer (Michel Piccoli) who goes berserk after getting the sack from work: he sleeps with his sister and destroys his apartment and, after the initial astonishment, his neighbors get the same anarchic bug. This streak of non-conformism also extends to sex (with plenty of non-graphic nudity on display), as Piccoli contrives to elicit uninhibited behavior from many of the females (be they nubile or frustrated) around him including the secretary, Marilu' Tolo, he had been caught unwittingly peeping on and subsequently seduced. Despite the occasional brutality, police intervention in the matter largely proves ineffectual. Though the point of it all is obscure unless it's that one needs to revert to some form of primeval state in order to survive the exigencies of the modern world  a handful of situations which crop up are definitely amusing: Piccoli and policeman Patrick Dewaere engaging in a tit-for-tat routine while the latter is rebuilding the façade of his apartment; feeling liberated, a victimized wife tries to assert herself and finally escapes her husband's tyranny through the window when he's not looking; a man spends practically the entire film lovingly washing his car but, then, at the very end he joins in the chaos by nonchalantly taking a sledge-hammer to it. Still, when all is said and done, the best thing about the film is its extraordinary fragmented editing." -- reviewer at imbdb

Watchable here!

Feels like a potential favorite film!

Strangely, this is the second French art film I've come across in a week where I've wondered whether J.G. Ballard saw it and was influenced. In this case, I'm thinking High-Rise, which was published in 1975. The other film is Weekend, by Jean-Luc Godard - I managed to get half way through, before taking a "pause", making it the nearest to watching a whole Godard I have ever got. Weekend came out several years before Crash. 

I have come across a quote from Ballard where he says that Godard completely misunderstood the phenomenon of the eroticized car crash: the film represents it as something to do with late capitalist decadence and soulless materialism, whereas for Ballard it's something both more primal and more humanly sophisticated (the libido creatively adapting to a hyper-technologized environment). Still, that could be a defensive warding off, a bit of "anxiety of influence". The bourgeoisie, bored, smashing things up for the nihilistic thrill of it - that would be a scenario that he would return to several times in his later career, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, etc. 

Weekend would make a good double bill with Hulot's Trafic, maybe. Or you could have a whole season of twisted films to do with automobiles - Two-Lane Blacktop. What else? 

Andrew Parker points to The Cars That Ate Paris (1974; directed by Peter Weir). "The small town of Paris, Australia deliberately causes car accidents, then sells/salvages all valuables from the wrecks as a means of economy."

And I guess the Max Max films would fit nicely. 

Duel, by Spielberg, would make a great inclusion.

Started watching Vanishing Point but didn't feel grabbed. 

Repo Man, another good one. 

Back to the amazingly titled Themroc....

It reminds me a bit - in spirit - of the anarchic satirical spirit, the grossness and grotesquerie, of La Grande Bouffe, which also came out in 1973, and involves a bunch of bored bourgeois middle-aged men who decide to eat themselves to death. 

 As a student I saw this listed in the programme of upcoming films at Oxford's Penultimate Picture Palace, a shabby cinema that specialized in foreign films and art movies, and knew I had to see it. And I was not disappointed. One character dies from a bout of flatulence. 

This was my season of seeing things like Fellini's Satyricon and Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a stab at becoming a cineaste that was never quite followed through (hence the not having seen a whole Godard... the only recently having watched my first Fassbinders). 

A few years back I got Bouffe out of our local excellent DVD rental store Videotheque (recently moved further away to Highland Park, sob) and while the leisurely pace of films made in the 1970s can be  disconcerting compared to contemporary movie norms, it's still a boggler What were they thinking, what was Marco Ferreri trying to say?  

Thomas Marks in Apollo magazine, tells the story: 

"In the wake of its premiere at the Festival de Cannes... audience members who had stayed the course booed and heckled the film’s director, Marco Ferreri, as he took to the stage with the cast..  Ingrid Bergman, president of the festival jury that year, is said to have been physically sick after the screening.

"Ferreri had unveiled a nihilistic fable, in which four jaded middle-aged men... gorge and screw themselves to death in a decrepit villa in Paris, assisted by three prostitutes (who eventually depart in disgust) and a libidinous school teacher (who does not). To the film’s defenders it was a caustic satire on the hedonistic dereliction of the bourgeoisie: ‘we handed people a mirror and they didn’t like seeing themselves in it,’ said the actor Philippe Noiret.... To its detractors it was nothing more than a pageant of perversity, a procession of feeding and farting and fornicating – and sometimes all at once. The moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse declared it ‘the most revolting film I have ever seen’.

"Ferreri certainly knew how to offend. He had persuaded four stars of French and Italian cinema – Noiret, Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi – to play against type as grotesque characters who shared the actors’ own first names, as though they were performing as themselves....  All the characters remained obstinately motiveless in their mission to scoff themselves into oblivion. The film’s length, at over two hours, seemed designed to exhaust the comic momentum of its inaugural feasting scenes.....  the unfading torture of sitting through its concentrated, repetitive excess, its continuous forkfuls of pasta and purée and breast-shaped blancmange, its fanfares of flatulence. As the critic Roger Ebert wrote on the film’s release, La Grande Bouffe is ‘more of an experience than a treatise’.

"... Film-makers had revelled in the theatre of food in the past – think of the roast pig that discharges its stuffing of cooked meats in Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) – but none had fastened on it in such detail. Perhaps that is why the chef Fergus Henderson describes La Grande Bouffe as ‘the greatest food film ever’ – citing a scene in which the protagonists slurp on marrow bones as the encouragement for his serving them at his St John Restaurant in London.

"Ferreri was himself both gourmet and gourmand, a man so fond of food that he had sought help for his overeating from a specialist clinic in Switzerland in the early 1970s. The inspiration for the film was a sybaritic dinner with actor friends, including the skilled amateur chef Tognazzi, who would play the chef in the film. 

"... The vast quantities of food required for the shoot were supplied by the high-end Parisian delicatessen Fauchon, with vans arriving early in the morning – as they do on screen – to deliver for the day’s filming.…’.

"The actors ate as they filmed, stuffing themselves every morning before the food spoiled under the lights. Noiret alone spat it out between takes. For the four men and their ringleader, at least, it must have been fun – until it started to feel like too much...."

Get out your Harraps French to English dictionary - or AI simultaneous translation software - for this mini-doc on Bouffe scandalizing Cannes