Buffet froid (1979) Reviews

• Are you an ear, nose and throat specialist?

  R_O_U_S2004-02-07

  Seriously, Gerard Depardieu has done very little for English language cinema. 1492? My Father The Hero? Green Card? I'll pass, thanks. But with subtitles he's great. This little-known absurdist drama puts him as one of three mismatched men linked by murder and random chance. The films opens at a train station where Depardieu meets a man who is soon dead – possibly by Depardieu's own hand. His wife dismisses it, but is soon dead herself. The police detective upstairs doesn't want to know, he has his own problems. And then the wife's murderer shows up for a chat. Could be a terrible thriller – is a bizarre comedy. The daunting, oppressive cityscapes in the bulk of the film eventually give way to a disconcerting bucolic countryside for the finale, but the surrealism never lets up. Enter this world, and don't expect to leave intact.

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• top dark

  jimi992002-06-29

  This is one of my favorite black comedies, on a level with Strangelove, After Hours, The Loved One, Little Murders and Cul de Sac. A kind of Three Stooges meets Samuel Beckett, it successfully traverses farce, slapstick, absurdism, and intellectual existential psychodrama. The stooges are hilarious, particularly Bernard Blier, the great French character actor (and father of director,) while the women are all in danger but really in control of this careening nightmare. The shift 3/4ths of the way through from the surreal city nightscape into the sunny countryside is brilliant and leads to a perfect ending...

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• Bunuel, farce and the policier? Yes please.

  alice liddell2000-03-01

  Imagine a crime film without all the usual elements - a beginning (crime), middle (investigation) and end; a guilty criminal and an investigative detective; a femme fatale who is punished; a restoration of order. BUFFET FROID is the nightmare flipside of the policier, where the hero is an unemployed philosopher, who may or may not be a murderer, who befriends his wife's killer, and his neighbour, a detective who sanctions paid homicide and is trapped in a plot where the answer he seeks is himself. Every revelation leads to further obfuscation and instead of the restoration of order is its destruction. The film plays like a futuristic thriller directed by Bunuel - and if Blier's ultimate timidity means it's never quite as good as that, it's still a remarkable achievement in mainstream, never mind generic, cinema, and very, very funny.

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• A Monument of humour

  Olivier-231999-08-30

  A monument of dark humour, Buffet Froid relies more on what is not said rather than the obvious slapstick humour we're being fed on extensively these days. I showed it to many people and a lot of them admitted they did not understand because it was not "anchored in reality" - to which I answered that not everything is supposed to be. This is superior quality surrealism, and the trio Depardieu-Blier-Carmet works wonders. RENT IT !

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• A black comedy about human life in mass society

  red_hyro2005-10-24

  The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote: "What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost it's power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them" I believe this film is attempting to express this sense of alienation through its absurd black humor, centered around an unemployed young man who has nightmares and is followed by anonymous death in his random comings and goings. Others have given various plot details, thus I will concern myself only with pointers and descriptions which may enrich your experience of this film. What is important to notice at first is not the absurdity of the action of the plot, which is very apparent from the first conversation of the film, but rather the concrete circumstances of the young man at the beginning of the film. He is unemployed, has no friends, and lives in an apartment building which had been until recently empty. Relationships he has and which he forms are without love, genuine care or meaning; they are merely people he bumps into on the way to eventual death (this includes most disturbingly his wife). He is not a part of anything, and makes no plans. This is a caricature of the modern, mass-society life, in which humans have no community in which their actions may be remembered after their death, no relation to others defined by the artifice which structures their world (i.e. living in apartment building, your neighbors are strangers, and you are 'closer' to people who may live halfway around the world, which is not how things have always been or will always be), and no connection in their lives to the means by which they are able to survive as an animal (i.e. your food shows up in supermarkets from somewhere and you buy it). What is life for this man? What awaits him? To be eventually erased it seems, blotted out without trace and forgotten as flies which we swat are forgotten. The films is terrifyingly funny in this sense, as we laugh at the empty absurdity of a life which has no story for the one living it, just a horrifying series of events which have no rational rhyme or reason, a life which the person living it accepts but does not embrace, cold in the world he finds himself occupying for a while. This may not seem like much of a recommendation, and yet for those who are interested in have their entertainment tainted with the challenge all good art poses for us as individuals, the view of life it espouses and which we find has become entangled with our own, making things stand out in our world that we had been unable to see before which prompt questions, often disturbing, we must seek to answer, 'Buffet Froid' is definitely worth checking out, whatever your final opinion as to its meaning or worth. It asks the viewer, "and what about you? You laugh at this man's life but how is your life fundamentally different from his? Is what you're occupying yourself with before death all that less absurd?"

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