Rêve De Singe aka Bye Bye Monkey (Marco Ferreri, 1977)
Set in the remarkable location of the Hudson River on the outskirts of New York City, Ferreri's 1977 masterpiece centres on Gerard Lafayette (Gérard Depardieu, on top form), who lives in a warehouse in the middle of some sort of vague, dystopian future. One day, he's walking along the river, and finds the dead corpse of King Kong. A live infant monkey is hiding next to the corpse, which Gerard, along with his friend Luigi (Ferreri favourite Marcello Mastroianni), decide to raise as their own.
Ferreri's film is as surreal as it sounds, but it never gets overly pretentious or boring. Like a David Lynch film, you never really understand what's fully going on, but you sense everything is linked in some way. For example, Gerard has a whistle he uses occasionally instead of speaking... could this be a way he reacts to emotionally stressful situations?
Gerard works in a Roman empire wax museum, run by James Coco, who has an amazing voice (he sounds a bit like voice-over king (not kong) Ken Nordine), and tells Gerard to ditch the monkey, as it will only bring bad luck.
Indeed, there's an awful lot going on in Ferreri's head in this film; A feminist theatre troupe who perform plays about pregnancy, incest & rape (in an early scene, they decide to rape Gerard); Beautiful NY-born porn star Abigail Clayton wandering around the film half-naked as Gerard's girlfriend, and wax dummies of Roman emperors being replaced by the faces of (at the time) modern politicians, e.g Nixon as Nero & JFK as Caesar, which typifies Ferreri's occasional metaphors and symbolism.
This is one of surrealist master Ferreri's best films. However bizarre it may be, it never ceases to entertain. This -Ferreri's first film in English- deservedly won the grand jury prize at Cannes. Depardieu is magnificent.
