If you were fascinated by the eating scene in Monty Pythons "The Meaning of Life", this might be up your alley. Nothing is covered up here, except the most explicit sex. It is a frontal attack on your limitations of accepted behavior and does it with increasing force, until the inevitable conclusion.
Four, middle aged, high society men, meet for a weekend in an old mansion to have a good time with lots of food. At first they express genuine love of food and share the joy of eating. One of the men, is starved for sex, and they soon agree to get 3 prostitutes to join them. In the yard of the mansion a plump female teacher is invited to join them also. As the evening progresses they eat and fornicate more and more excessively and we start to get a feeling that it is not the usual kind of partying we are in for. The next day they intensifies eating and the portions gets larger and larger and at some point the prostitutes has had enough of this food orgie and they leave. The teacher stays though and she has broken all inhibitions and participates in the orgie, as the four mens sex-swap partner. The next night they start to get constipation and they need to help each other fart to make place for more food. At some point the wc explodes from clogging from the extreme amount of shit they have dumped, and one guy gets covered in it. The eating has now become extremely exaggerated and repulsive, and one guy dies during the night while trying to drive away in his vintage car. Soon another guy dies literally shitting himself to death and the third guy dies while lying on the kitchen table, being stuffed with food and jerked off at the same time. The last guy gives up his breath in the yard, after he tries to eat two huge cakes the teacher brought out to him.
There is no way in reality, that you can eat yourself to death, not in such short amount of time at least, so obviously this film works solely on a metaphorical plane. Food is the center of the stage, so to say so figuring out that metaphor should prove the best way to understand what this movie is supposed to tell us. There is something called the Aristotelian mean, which refers to situations where you should find a middle ground. In this case too little or no food kills you, but at the other end too much food will also kill you and finding a healthy and decent middle point is virtuous and sane. So we are dealing with a principle that is consciously violated by the men and it accelerates out of control in a auto-catalytic fashion. The more they eat the more they want to eat it seems. So to me this is all about loosing your touch with your sense of balance in life and since it is generally considered virtuous to being able to control these balances, the movie is a metaphor for the notion that humanity has lost its sense of balance in all life´s aspects. In normal life it shows most clearly in the loss of respect for food and a purely hedonistic view of sex. In this regard it is also very much a movie of its times. The sexual revolution and the economic boom of the sixties seemed to have made everyone crazy about getting more and more and not care for the consequences and not giving a shit basically. This is also at a time close after the liberation of pornography and sexual extremity has almost become the norm rather than something to try to control. One feeling i did get through out though was a sense of "the end of an era" or "the collapse of the empire". This is brought about by the mansion, which feels like and old roman house that is worn and has been neglected for years, though still usable for consuming food and sex. This could be seen as a metafor for the western world having let go of the old virtues and now just eats and fucks until it dies from it.
It was not an engaging movie for me. I was not offended by the scenery, but it was not reflective or philosophical enough to grab me. It is one long assault on your social morality and only at the end does it become a bit engaging in its extremity and the silence after the collapse. It is not a style and scenario that appeals to me. It found it kind of tiring when I realized early on where this was going to go, it was just to sit it through and await the end as predicted. The shock effect may have been huge 40 years ago, but now it feels a bit dated.
Rating: 4/10
