The film's true interest resides, above all, in the effective scenes of dark humor and in the general idea of the script, which is surely Marco Ferreri's most ambitious one to date. [Full Review in Spanish]

Ferreri's first English-language film... is more of a collection of disjointed ideas than an actual story.

A hopelessly irrelevant, downright interminable piece of work...

BYE BYE MONKEY (1978) - Sadly unable to find an American theatrical distributor when initially released, director Marco Ferreri's visual treatise on gender roles and human civilization - while often inscrutable - is kept afloat by sympathetic performances and startling visuals. Gerard Depardieu - who was perhaps the most daring actor working circa the late-'70s - is once again totally uninhibited as a man who finds a baby monkey in the shadow of the World Trade Center and decides to raise it as his own; Marcello Mastroianni has several touching moments as a sexually frustrated misfit who has become disillusioned with America; while James Coco is properly imperious as a wax museum proprietor interested in preserving a certain type of masculinity. Multi-layered and heavily symbolic (and with enough nudity and sex to easily qualify for a 1978 X-rating), this one is for connoisseurs of the offbeat and those who miss the good old days of intellectual arthouse cinema.