Bye Bye Monkey

Italian director Marco Ferreri can be seen either as a wild iconoclast or a poor man's Fellini, depending on your patience for his brand of swirling surrealism. This 1978 effort, which won the Grand Prix Jury Award at Cannes but never received a U.S. theatrical release, is typical of his uniquely cryptic weirdness. Set in an uncommonly dismal New York, the film follows two offbeat European immigrants—an older Italian (Marcello Mastroianni in bad makeup) and a young Frenchman (Gerard Depardieu) who discover the corpse of King Kong lying near the Hudson River by the World Trade Center (an obvious homage to the disastrous 1976 Dino De Laurentiis epic). When they also find a tiny chimpanzee, the pair assume it is Kong's offspring, after which the Frenchman adopts the primate and raises it as his son. This particular sequence of events actually represents the most logical aspect of the film, which is mostly a chain of unrelated situations tied to the endless wars between both the sexes and the generations. The humor is often grotesque but silly, while Ferreri's impression of New York as a den of depraved, dumb, and pointless people quickly becomes tiresome. James Coco overacts (as usual) as the owner of a wax museum that is set on fire, and then-sixtysomething Geraldine Fitzgerald gets goosed by Depardieu (don't ask). Ferreri oddly opted to shoot the film in English—a major mistake, since Mastroianni and Depardieu are notorious for their obvious lack of comfort in English-language dialogue. Fans of the seriously offbeat may be entertained, but most will be bored, baffled, or both. DVD extras include an excerpt from a documentary about Ferreri. Optional. [Note: Ferreri's Don't Touch the White Woman—starring Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve—is also newly available.] (P. Hall)