The Last Woman

If Paul Morrissey's Flesh had examined any of the many questions it raised instead of simply parading them like fashions, it might well have turned into something like Ferreri's movie. Here the boyish male sex object is Depardieu, but both he and the women in his life are painfully conscious that man cannot live by his cock alone; his wife (Zouzou) has turned feminist and left him; his girlfriend (Muti) is frigid, somewhat neurotic, and very unsure of herself; and Depardieu, whose ideal is a life of eating, fucking and sleeping, is finally driven to self-mutilation in his inability to live up to his own patriarchal image of himself. It's as fraught and desperate as it sounds, and as laboriously worked out as you'd expect from the director of La Grande Bouffe; as there, though, the freshness of the performances just about makes the pessimism tolerable.