Marco Ferreri – Ciao maschio aka Bye Bye Monkey (1978)

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1978. It would be interesting to bail up the panel now and ask them why they gave Ferreri’s film the award (in a tied decision with in tie with Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout). I suspect that they would not remember, let alone be able to explain why. In the 70s the absurdist, non-conventional, sexually-candid aspects of the film were all qualities that were regarded as inherently significant but times change and like so many films of its era, the meaning is now far less apparent. Broadly speaking, Ferreri’s first English-language film is a Fellini-esque portrait of the male species under attack from castrating women. Gérard Depardieu stars as a lighting technician who is raped multiple times by the members of the feminist theatrical group he works for. He subsequently finds a baby chimpanzee inside the remains of a huge stuffed gorilla and starts a relationship with one of his rapists. Marcello Mastroianni as a lonely old man and James Coco as a decadent wax museum owner also move in and out of the story. Whilst the images of the characters with the beached giant gorilla (which presumably Ferreri salvaged from Dino De Laurentis’ 1976 remake of King Kong) shot against the New York skyline are haunting and there are individual moments of surreal humour throughout the film, the absence of much in the way of narrative, characterological or dramatic development will make Ferreri’s film a trial for those other than students of the era or of the director’s work in particular.
BH @ cinephilia.net.au

Bye Bye Monkey NTSC DVD DD2.0 x264 UioP.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 53mn
Size: 	2.00 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	716x462 ~> 854x462
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 286 Kbps
BPP: 	0.288
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/3E082E936C7F93E/Bye_Bye_Monkey_NTSC_DVD_DD2.0_x264_UioP.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English (muxed)