Bye Bye Monkey (1978)

Anyone who sees life as a progression of disconnected absurdities will appreciate the serious worldview lurking beneath the black comedy of Bye Bye Monkey (1977), director Marco Ferreri’s smirking melodrama of foreigners behaving surreally in New York City. The titular chimp is ostensibly a furry primate scavenged by French immigrant Gerard Deperdieu from the embrace of a big, dead ape lying in rot on the lower end of Manhattan. Prior to saving the monkey, Deperdieu, the only male in a radical feminist theater troupe, has just been the brunt of his cast mates’ reenacted sex fantasies. Subsequent to the chimp’s demise, fatally gnawed by a mob of rats, Gerard expires in the flames of a torched wax museum, and the audience is left to conclude that perhaps they themselves have been made into the biggest monkey of all.