The shadow of a warning is cast by Blier’s outrageously daring urban nightmare. Its characters are not just cynical, irrational, or perhaps indifferent to what we may consider the received range of emotions—they simply react according to a subverted logic which is perfectly coherent, but to a different set of values. To an even more absurdist effect, Blier places the individualist feral pulses of his creatures in a cold and largely empty dehumanised environment. The aesthetics of Buffet froid echo the void embodied by the lonely figures who inhabit it—desolated train stations, soulless modernist spaces, dismal interiors of metal beams, concrete walls, wooden boxes, and a near post atomic deserted natural nowhere. The only hint to traditional beauty, art that is, in the form of Brahms’s music, is in fact a nuisance that triggers more distress, estrangement, and victims. Whether this is a menacing projection of our contemporary society or a witty caricature of it, is for the audience to say—and for them to take the leap beyond the comedic appearance of the film. Of course, that was the tense and erratic decade that followed the hysterical optimism of the previous, and yet I wonder if those concerns have really vanished forty years on. If I still burst out laughing when Depardieu introduces his new visitor to his neighbour, the police inspector, bluntly saying, ‘Je vous présente l’assassin de ma femme,’ is because some truth in that humour has outlived its time.
