Barry Forshaw

Roberto Curti has long been one of the most astute and perceptive guides to the cinema of his country, and each new volume by him adds another strand to our understanding of Italian film. This lively and informed study of the often outrageous projects of Marco Ferreri is well up to the standard of the author’s previous work. Ferreri’s films included the censor-baiting La Grande Bouffe, in which four friends, played by Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Ugo Tognazzi and Philippe Noiret, retreat to a country mansion where they determine to eat themselves to death whilst engaging in group sex with prostitutes and a local woman school teacher. (The film was criticised on release for its perversity, decadence and attack on the bourgeoisie yet won the prestigious FIPRESCI prize after its screening at the Cannes Film Festival). Similarly provocative — though less shocking — was The Harem, an eccentric erotic piece, with Carroll Baker as a seductive woman who lures the three men she desires to her villa, pushing them to their limits by toying with their sexual needs and egos. Perhps the most affecting example of his work was The Ape Woman, showcasing a remarkable performance by Annie Girardot as the hirsute title character. The film is genuinely heartbreaking – particularly as it anticipates David Lynch’s The Elephant Man in its unsparing picture of the exploitation as a ‘freak’ of a person suffering catastrophic physical change. The film was based on the true story of 19th-century carnival performer Julia Pastrana. In Ferreri’s film, an extraordinary Annie Girardot delivers a devastating performance as Maria, a convent scullery maid whose body is covered in hair, from head to toe. The film won a Palme d’Or nomination. Curti does all of these films (and the director’s other work) the best possible service, and is the most eloquent of advocates for this confrontational director. The book is written with Curti’s customary combination of scholarship and enthusiasm. I’ve previously written of the writer’s authority in the field of the Italian cinema, as his various books have repeatedly proved (notably Italian Gothic Horror Films 1957-1969 and 1970-1979).

Marco Ferreri: The Films of an Italian Provocateur by Roberto Curti is published by McFarland