La dernière femme

After having attended a film festival in Creteil (a posh suburb of Paris), I accidentally got a chance to watch "La derniere femme" on big screen. This invigorating experience took me in a not so distant past to a nice place called Creteil circa 1976. I was much too thrilled to have known Creteil through the vision of a maverick filmmaker Marco Ferreri for which he teamed with his regular partner Rafael Azcona. La dernière femme is a film which will easily please people of varied tastes. It can be liked by feminists,admirers of actors Depardieu and Ornella Muti and supporters of a highly unconventional filmmaker Marco Ferreri. The essential charm of this film lies in Creteil and its high rise buildings.Some of them are occupied by the likes of Depardieu and Muti.There is Michel Piccoli too who lends credible support to the narrative pattern. During my viewing of this film I did not mind at all watching a small kid act alongside Depardieu and Muti.I doubt as to how this can be true of other viewers who might find such a move harmful for young minds. Watch it to explore other films by Marco Ferreri.

Before Lars von Trier (the 'bad' one - the one who directed 'Antichrist' and 'Nymphomaniac') there was Marco Ferreri. In 1976, when he made 'La dernière femme', the Italian screenwriter and director had wowed bourgeois audiences (and the members of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival) with 'La grande bouffe', a film in which four men gather to eat until they die. With the erotic drama 'La dernière femme' Ferreri probably set out to explore the limits again, tackling another theme related to human desires - sexuality and the ways in which it is perceived by men and women. The result was a controversial film, as he wanted, banned or limited for certain audiences in many cinema markets, the ending of which has become something of a legend in the history of cinema. It would not be Marco Ferreri's last 'shocking' film. I saw it almost half a century after it was made. I believe that if it was made today the film would be just as controversial, if not more controversial. But it's also a film that raises a lot of questions, bold in both theme and approach, with superb acting, famous actors in some of the most interesting roles of their careers, and enough mystery and ambiguity to leave room for hot debates.

Unlike the characters in 'La grande bouffe', who belong to the rich classes, the heroes of 'La dernière femme' are ordinary people, living in an urban environment unsettling by the rectangular artificiality of the buildings and the banality of the interiors. In the first scene of the film the engineer Gérard is fired from his job in a big chemical factory, but he does not seem at all affected by this situation. His worries are raising his one-year-old son and especially chasing after women. We learn soon that his wife had left him with the child in his care to devote herself to a feminist political career and perhaps to maintain a lesbian relationship. Gérard brings home Valerie, the gorgeous caretaker from the daycare where he was bringing his son. What starts as a casual fling develops into a complex relationship. Gérard and Valerie don't seem to match at all, what each is looking for in a relationship is as different as in the relationship between Mars and Venus. They don't love each other, they have a lot of sex, but neither finds satisfaction in their relationship, not to mention happiness. Is Valerie too immature? Is Gérard too self-absorbed? The two are neither able to love, nor separate, nor destroy each other. Maybe only themselves.

The acting performances are formidable. Gérard Depardieu makes one of his first great roles here, one of the creations in which he melts into the character and dominates it at the same time, a mixture of physical strength and vulnerability, sincerity and restrained violence. Ornella Muti is mesmerizingly beautiful, at once magnetic on the outside and cold on the inside, the exact opposite of the cerebral wife who had left her husband and child for political militancy. The characters remain open to interpretations and each of the viewers will have to judge which of them is the victim, if any. Or maybe they are both victims of circumstances, of a militant feminism that makes sense on the public stage but can become toxic in private? Michel Piccoli and Nathalie Baye also appear in supporting roles. Luciano Tovoli's cinematography creates an ambience that suggests the existential pressure of a world where society's indifference generates personal crises. Viewers who plan to watch 'La dernière femme' need to be warned about its extremes, but those who dare will be rewarded.

I am a Marco Ferreri fun, this superlative movie has Ornella Muti still young - she became my number 1 for years. I saw it in 1977. I must see this film again with more 23 years on my eyes. Recently I saw "L'Inconnu the Strasbourg" and I felt in love with the new "charm" of Ornella Muti as a mature woman and I cried of happiness. I hope to see her again soon.

The good news is this movie features some gratuitous nudity from the beauteous Italian actress Ornella Muti. The bad news is it features far, far more gratuitous nudity from the not-so-beauteous and quite corpulent French actor Gerard Depardieu. This is another slice of Italo-Gallic insanity from director Marco Ferreti. It somewhat resembles his later, more famous film "Ciao, Monkey", but instead of a baby monkey, Depardieu's character has a chubby human baby. But like the monkey in the later film, the male baby is largely a metaphor for the perpetual narcissistic infantilism of Depardieu's character.

Depardieu plays a single father whose feminist wife leaves him alone with their small baby. This doesn't slow down his inveterate womanizing,however, and he soon starts an affair with a young daycare teacher (Muti). It's a little disturbing, especially by modern-day standards, the way Depardieu and Muti engage in naked foreplay pretty much right in front of the baby (although they do have the decency to go into the next room to actually screw). Children that young have little memory, however, so I'm sure the infant actor was much less traumatized by Depardiue's bloated nude body than I was. Anyway, there's a lot of melodrama involving the Depardieu character's continuing compulsive infidelities and his feelings of male irrelevancy in the face of feminism and female sexual liberation. In fact, if the male organ with its insatiable appetites, extreme insecurities, and fickle nature somehow became an actual person it would be just like Depardieu's character in this movie. (So basically, Depardieu here plays a big chubby dick).

As other reviewers have said,the end of this movie is quite shocking-- Depardieu is harpooned by Captain Ahab and he drags him, his ship, and his entire crew to the bottom of the ocean. . . Oh wait, that was "Moby Dick". Well, the end of this movie is even more shocking, especially if you're male. Depardieu does give a very good performance, so I certainly would recommend this to his fans. Muti is not as good (but, oh man, is she beautiful), and this film really marks her transition to the kind of daring art films she is best known for (and without which she'd be a forgotten Italian version of Brooke Shields today) And whatever you can say about Marco Ferreti's films, they're definitely NOT dull. This not great, but check it out if it sounds interesting to you.

All of the reviews so far have missed the mark on this one. The funniest comment is that Depardieu is "corpulent." He doesn't have a six-pack, by any means, but he is not at all corpulent. Even in his later years, he has been, at most, a little chunky. What intrigues me most of all is that none of the reviews mention the creepy fact that a number of sex scenes in this film have a toddler in the middle of them, and that Gerard Depardieu, in a few scenes, spends an inappropriate time exploring said toddler's boy parts. I get that it's supposed to be a comment on some vague Freudian male penis obsession, but it doesn't have to be creepy like that to make such a point (whatever point that is; it's never made clear). It stops just this side of getting the baby involved in the sex, but goes as far as having a swinger fondling party while the baby watches and to have the baby naked on the bed between Depardieu and Muti carrying out some obvious foreplay, to name a couple of disturbing examples. No wonder this one is hard to find.