Translating 1978’s Ciao Maschio as Bye Bye Monkey doesn’t really help the film very much. Literally, it should be something like Farewell Machismo, and that title makes a lot more sense when you actually watch the film, whose eventual English-language title has been overwhelmed by the presence of a chimpanzee in the film.
So, where to start with this one? It’s a strange movie set in New York, directed by a veteran, very talented Italian director, Marco Ferreri, with a cast of French and Italian stars. All concerned seem to be indulging themselves in what looks like late-to-the-party entry-level absurdist situationism.
A bit of plot will help clarify things. In opening scenes we meet Lafayette (Gérard Depardieu, no less), a lusty dude who does nothing very specific in off-off-off Broadway theatre, where he seems to be the oddjob man and sweeper-up after a troupe of radical feminist dancers interrogating the zeitgeist with a new piece about rape. To more fully understand what they’re dealing with, they decide to rape Lafayette while he’s unconscious, in a slightly playful, sexy 1970s way, you understand.
For the bulk of the movie Lafayette communicates by half-heartedly blowing a referee’s whistle. If he’s not doing that he’s frolicking on the Manhattan shoreline, which is where he first finds an abandoned baby chimpanzee, sheltering beneath one of the limbs of a model of King Kong. And when not on the beach he’s either hanging with Luigi, an artist who’s always crying, played by Marcello Mastroianni. Or with the toga-wearing Flaxman, who runs a waxworks full of Ancient Greeks and Romans. Flaxman the waxman, easily remembered. He’s played by James Coco, a specialist at oddballs.
Or he’s in bed with Angelica (Abigail Clayton), the young lady who initiated his rape (he obviously seemed to like it).
Ferreri is a master of eccentric characters and here he indisputably gives us a series of well drawn and amusing types. Lafayette and his whistle, Flaxman and his declamatory speechifying, Luigi and his Old European fatalism, plus Angelica, who takes her clothes off whenever possible, Ferreri even throwing in a scene of spectacular gratuitousness just in case we hadn’t clocked her stuff from every angle. Since Clayton was a porn star (here in her first straight role and very good), she was presumably used to being asked to do this sort of thing.
As if that weren’t enough, there’s Mrs Toland (Geraldine Fitzgerald) and her sidekicks – Miko (Avon Long), who will play a tune on the comb and tissue paper at the drop of a hat, and a stately old guy who spends most of his time asleep.
All of them, every one, characters in search of a plot. Every scene in this movie is good, but where is it going? There’s the vague idea – spawned by the title – that Ferreri is exploring, in a playfully oblique way, lost guys slightly washed up on the beach of 1970s feminism, searching for their inner purpose.
If that is what he’s doing then the answer to the question of what men are good for would appear to be – sex. At the receiving end (the rape) or as beneficent givers – Lafayette generously has sex with Mrs Toland at one point, the pairing of the mid-30s Depardieu and mid-60s Fitzgerald still remarkable all these decades later.
Ferreri is shooting in a grungily gorgeous boho 1970s New York where everyone inhabits a loft or a spacious brick-built house that would be impossible to afford now. Flaxman the waxman’s museum would also be untenable – no one visits it, except by accident. Tricked out like a thrift store, with old advertising signs here and there, it all looks incredibly chic in that Warhol/Factory way.
When the film’s finale finally comes – after many wordy, non sequitur scenes spinning through all the characters – it’s the museum that will provide the setting for a very House of Wax climax, probably self-consciously so.
Sight unseen you’d swear it was the debut work of a young American indie film-maker a touch in hock to the French New Wave, rather than a 50-ish Italian dude who’d started out making stylish conventional black and white Italian comedies at the back end of the 1950s. Maybe that’s the way to watch it, as a film about a guy (Lafayette) re-inventing himself, made by a guy (Ferreri) doing the same.
Bye Bye Monkey – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024