PREFIGURING THE American sex comedies of the '80s, Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe (1973) is like a college vacation movie for the art house crowd. The film follows four (grown) men as they hole themselves up in a mansion outside of Paris and gorge themselves on food and women. It's the ultimate vacation, a "spring break" of pure pleasure.

This being a European film for the art house circuit, the filmmakers couldn't quite justify a movie about hedonism without repercussions, so the "plot" is about how the four men (Marcello Mastroianni, Philippe Noiret, Michel Piccoli, and Ugo Tognazzi) have gathered to eat themselves to death. The fact that they don't seem to want to die is unimportant; the movie is not about pain and self-destruction as much as it's about overdosing on pleasure. With that in mind, it's not surprising that early on, Mastroianni's character (a pilot with an enormous sex drive), calls in a few prostitutes for everyone to enjoy.

In a move befitting a film more about pleasure than pain, the characters eventually die off when they become satiated. The most surprising character is the plump kindergarten teacher who is drawn into the food 'n' sex orgy. Initially seen by the men as a proper woman who likes food and would be offended by the company of loose women, she ends up having an even larger appetite for sex than any of them. Impressively, she ends up coming across as much sexier than the prostitutes, and is absolutely the strongest character in the film, with the biggest appetite for life.

Unlike the compact spring break movies of the '80s, however, La Grande Bouffe is over two hours long, and moving from overindulgence to overindulgence gets a little tiresome. But that's not the point. Obviously Ferreri had a desire to gather a few of his friends together for an orgy of food and women, and chose to justify (and extend) the experience by making it into a movie. The set must have been a joy to be on, and that joy comes through, even when the movie drags on.