Bye Bye Monkey

Description

Bye Bye Monkey has been called one of Italian director Marco Ferreri's most powerful and haunting works. Variety describes it as "a sort of fable on man's transient state today, which [Ferreri] intimates has about destroyed all the old standards, leaving little to replace them...[a] sometimes jolting, entertaining and disturbing look at a fringe side of mankind." In this richly symbolic work, Gerard Depardieu and Marcello Mastroianni star as two foreign eccentrics whose discovery of an abandoned baby chimpanzee causes them to question their own lives. Winner of the 1978 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize of the Jury.

Customer Reviews:

Bye Bye Monkey.......2004-08-14

Marco Ferreri's 'Bye Bye Monkey' is a masterpiece of anarchic cinema. With its bizarre, highly symbolic story of a man (Depardieu) who attempts to father a monkey he finds in the palm of a huge dead ape lying dead on the beach. What is most astonishing about the film is the way it becomes moving in such a primal, illogical way... Great art is almost always anarchic to an extent and goes against logic, convention or any other form of calculation. The images in Ferreri's film take on a new kind of power, the hypnotic scenes soar in such a way that rarely seems possible, and we are reminded that great art creates its own logic. Ferreri also achieves a kind of beautiful tone that is entirely his own: symbolic and yet intimate, haunting and exaggerated, realistic in its portray of surrealism. It's a somber, nihilistic film that achieves a clarity not often seen in symbolism, everything that happens in the film seems expected, regardless of how bizarre it may seem.
He has managed to find an anarchic logic.

Absurdism to the T!.......2001-08-09

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.

Average customer rating:

Ciao maschio
Starring: Gérard Depardieu , Marcello Mastroianni , James Coco , Geraldine Fitzgerald , and Gail Lawrence
Director: Marco Ferreri
Manufacturer: Manga Films
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Art House & International | Genres | DVD | Video

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ASIN: B000BMWL40

Product Description

Spain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada. Languages: o Spanish (subtitles) o English (Dolby Digital 2.0) Synopsis: Lafayette (Gerard Depardieu), a young-ish misfit Frenchman and Nocello (Marcello Mastroianni), an older misfit Italian, live in a run-down section of New York City and are friends. Lafayette works for Flaxman (James Coco), an excitable antiquarian who owns and runs something called the "Roman Museum," by means of which he upholds the standards of a former age. Lafayette also works for a women's lib group, which one day decides to "rape" him to see how the shoe fits on the other foot. Rather than being much bothered, Lafayette starts a liaison with the woman who actually had sex with him. In this rambling tale, these men are shown to have great difficulty enduring intense emotions, and the situations that arise force them to confront this difficulty repeatedly. Special Features: o Biographies o Filmographies o Interactive Menu o Scene Access

DVD:

DVD

DVD