The challenge of critiquing something like Bye Bye Monkey is that its storyline (if you can even call it that) is based in a logic so strange and unapproachable that there’s no way of telling what anyone else is going to get out of this movie. I know that I watched a movie, and can roughly recall the order in which events take place, but I am hard pressed to explain exactly how those things came together into what one would call a story. That’s not necessarily a fault, but it does make the experience difficult to relate.
Gerard Lafayette (Gerard Depardieu) is a young man of no particular distinction who makes his living in the slums of New York City by working odd jobs. One day, he comes across the body of King Kong washed up on a nearby beach, with his infant son (played by a none too convincing chimpanzee) still caught between the folds of his arm. Moved, Gerard adopts the infant and attempts to raise it with the help of his friend Luigi (Marcello Mastroianni). That’s about it as far as the story goes, but there are a few other things going on here, such as:
- One of the people who Lafayette works for is Andres Flaxman (James Coco), the proprietor of a small museum dedicated to preserving the memory of the Roman Empire. He spends most of his time making plaster cast figures of ancient historical figures in the likenesses of American Presidents, such as Kennedy and Nixon.
- Early in the film, a group of women try to rape Gerard. In spite of this, one of them (popular 70s adult film star Abigail Clayton) acts as the surrogate mother for the child of Kong with Lafayette (she does, however, refuse to sleep with him because she loves him too much).
- This film takes place after the apocalypse has occurred. I swear that if you watched this film on mute, you’d never know.
My first reaction upon hearing the film’s synopsis was ‘that’s awesome’ , and indeed, a film in which the corpse of a giant gorilla figures prominently in the background might be just up your alley. But for something with such a ludicrous concept, there is almost no joy of invention or revelry in its deliberate obtuseness. All of the actors (particularly Depardieu) play the film straight (and I don’t mean tongue-in-cheek; I mean they’re taking this seriously), the way that one would expect actors to in a Cassavettes film, and were it not for the presence of the giant King Kong dummy on the beach, this could easily be mistaken for one.
So what was Ferreri going for? Was his serious tone just another devious ploy in an already defiantly unique film? Or are we expected to take this film seriously as a drama? If asked, one would expect Ferreri’s response to be something like those that David Lynch always gives when asked about things such as the mutant baby from Eraserhead: "I don’t want to talk about it", and in reality, he’s probably right. Analyzing or explaining a movie like this would ruin it completely, because there’s really nothing to explain. Either you respond to a movie like this, or you don’t.
For my own part, I really didn’t. Maybe it’s just difficult for me to engage with any film centered around monkeys that doesn’t feature them throwing their own feces at one another/uptight matrons/unsuspecting tourists, but Monkey seemed to be working so hard to prevent me from understanding where it was coming from that by the end, I felt almost totally apathetic towards it. Perhaps it takes a lens other than mine to see what’s so astonishing about this film (obviously the people at Cannes liked it), but that probably takes a lens I don't have.
DVD Bonus Features
The DVD also contains a short excerpt from ‘Marco Ferreri: The Director Who Came From The Future”, which does little to nothing to illuminate what was so confusing about this film.
"Bye Bye Monkey" is on sale July 14, 2009 and is rated NR. Foreign. Directed by Marco Ferreri. Written by Rafael Azcona, Gerard Brach, Alice Colombo, Anselma Dell'Ollo, Marco Ferrari. Starring Abigail Clayton, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Gerard Depardieu, James Coco, Marcello Mastroianni.
