Bye Bye Monkey

Is it another world, or our world gone mad? Ferreri has quite an imagination, especially his use of juxtaposition: a rotting carcass of King Kong, a wax museum where James Coco reenacts parts of history, and an underground society where rats prevail. Depardieu, who's lines are badly dubbed, manages to get through this yarn uncomfortably gripping a chimp where he found beside the dead Kong. Mastroianni is always at his best, altho this time presenting a more cartoonish characterization. However, despite the exotic idiosyncrasies, this film can be rather dull at moments. Nevertheless, I enjoyed a large percentage of this movie, ad hominem the ambiguous finale which may help clarifies the film's bizarre symbolism. Watch this one on a rainy day.

You know how foreign movies have the reputation for being extremely weird and full of naked people? Well, if you've ever seen a foreign movie from the 1970s, you know why. They're weird! Everybody takes their clothes off!

In Bye Bye Monkey, a bunch of disconnected stories are all joined together. And everyone takes their clothes off. An independent girls' theater troupe discusses whether or not it's possible for a man to be raped, then decides to put the question to the test. James Coco makes wax replicas of Ancient Rome, then decides to make the faces likenesses of American presidents. Geraldine Fitzgerald longs for love she's never experienced. And finally, Gérard Depardieu finds a baby monkey on the beach and adopts him. Marcello Mastroianni tags along in various scenes, but it's not really clear why, and Abigail Clayton falls in love with Gérard, even though he's never without his pet monkey and constantly blows through a metal whistle when he breathes. Yes, he's gorgeous, but nothing in this movie makes sense.

In an inarguably adorable scene, Gérard tries to leave the baby monkey in the park and walk away. The monkey shrieks and runs after him, then climbs up his body to nestle in the crook of his arm. In the next scene, Gérard gives the monkey a little bed, and you can see the animal smiling. That's about as cute as it gets. The rest of the movie is either weird or upsetting, but if you really like 1970s foreign movies or have never seen one, this is a perfect example. Ironically, the entire movie is spoken in English, and Gérard speaks more English in this movie than he did in Green Card!

Kiddy Warning: Obviously, you have control over your own children. However, due to nudity, graphic sex scenes, and an upsetting scene involving an animal, I wouldn't let my kids watch it.

Strange, and it has some interesting bits, but it's dull and nonsensically plotted. Gerard Depardieu and Marcello Mastroinanni make asses of themselves, and Gail Lawrence, better known under her porn name, Abigail Clayton, is naked for about 50% of the film. Depardieu plays a boy toy in New York City. One day his friend, played by Mastroianni, is walking along the beach when he discovers the corpse of King Kong, whose orphaned baby he gets Depardieu to adopt. The themes involve the ever-changing gender roles, and this could have been very interesting. Unfortunately, it has no real plot to speak of, and it just meanders from weird scene to weird scene. Sometimes, the visuals are quite haunting, especially when the characters are on the beach with the New York cityscape towering over them and the giant ape corpse dominating the bottom of the frame. 5/10.

This is not a real movie in terms of a story but rather a collection of impressions about the life of a lonely guy living somewhere in a future New York slum during an apocalyptic virus wave that caused the death of thousands of people. He's surviving by taking bizarre jobs for a living, and finally he's finding a small monkey as a buddy.

The whole atmosphere is disturbing and sinister, but the "story" is a bit lame sometimes. The photography is stunning and occasionally reminds of the famous apocalyptic paintings of Hieronimus Bosch to the shadowy impressions of Enrico de Chirico. A really disturbing, surreal French movie featuring a young Gerard Depardieu.

an oddly desolate New York overrun by rats, Gerard Depardieu works at a Roman history wax museum, gets "raped" by a feminist performance art troupe, pals around with a sexually frustrated Marcello Mastroianni ("I have some kind of monster between my legs!"), seduces the elderly hostess of a dinner party in front of the guests, and discovers the corpse of King Kong on the beach, who is clutching an infant monkey that he then adopts. A stencil on Depardieu's wall asks "Why?!" and that's a good question. Although composed of several interesting elements (some of which recall Ferreri's earlier THE SEED OF MAN) it doesn't gel into any cohesive whole. The best I can do at putting it together is to say it's an absurdist treatise on the decline of civilization, but not all the pieces seem to fit. It's an exercise in non-sequitur, and that's not a form I enjoy very much unless it's done very light-heartedly. There are amusing moments but the overall tempo is too sluggish. Also, the performances aren't very good except for Depardieu and Mastroianni, and even they don't appear to understand what they're doing. Sometimes Ferreri's idiosyncrasies add up to something really exciting, but here it's a near miss.