The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote: "What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost it's power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them" I believe this film is attempting to express this sense of alienation through its absurd black humor, centered around an unemployed young man who has nightmares and is followed by anonymous death in his random comings and goings. Others have given various plot details, thus I will concern myself only with pointers and descriptions which may enrich your experience of this film.
What is important to notice at first is not the absurdity of the action of the plot, which is very apparent from the first conversation of the film, but rather the concrete circumstances of the young man at the beginning of the film. He is unemployed, has no friends, and lives in an apartment building which had been until recently empty. Relationships he has and which he forms are without love, genuine care or meaning; they are merely people he bumps into on the way to eventual death (this includes most disturbingly his wife). He is not a part of anything, and makes no plans. This is a caricature of the modern, mass-society life, in which humans have no community in which their actions may be remembered after their death, no relation to others defined by the artifice which structures their world (i.e. living in apartment building, your neighbors are strangers, and you are 'closer' to people who may live halfway around the world, which is not how things have always been or will always be), and no connection in their lives to the means by which they are able to survive as an animal (i.e. your food shows up in supermarkets from somewhere and you buy it).
What is life for this man? What awaits him? To be eventually erased it seems, blotted out without trace and forgotten as flies which we swat are forgotten. The films is terrifyingly funny in this sense, as we laugh at the empty absurdity of a life which has no story for the one living it, just a horrifying series of events which have no rational rhyme or reason, a life which the person living it accepts but does not embrace, cold in the world he finds himself occupying for a while.
This may not seem like much of a recommendation, and yet for those who are interested in have their entertainment tainted with the challenge all good art poses for us as individuals, the view of life it espouses and which we find has become entangled with our own, making things stand out in our world that we had been unable to see before which prompt questions, often disturbing, we must seek to answer, 'Buffet Froid' is definitely worth checking out, whatever your final opinion as to its meaning or worth. It asks the viewer, "and what about you? You laugh at this man's life but how is your life fundamentally different from his? Is what you're occupying yourself with before death all that less absurd?"
What is important to notice at first is not the absurdity of the action of the plot, which is very apparent from the first conversation of the film, but rather the concrete circumstances of the young man at the beginning of the film. He is unemployed, has no friends, and lives in an apartment building which had been until recently empty. Relationships he has and which he forms are without love, genuine care or meaning; they are merely people he bumps into on the way to eventual death (this includes most disturbingly his wife). He is not a part of anything, and makes no plans. This is a caricature of the modern, mass-society life, in which humans have no community in which their actions may be remembered after their death, no relation to others defined by the artifice which structures their world (i.e. living in apartment building, your neighbors are strangers, and you are 'closer' to people who may live halfway around the world, which is not how things have always been or will always be), and no connection in their lives to the means by which they are able to survive as an animal (i.e. your food shows up in supermarkets from somewhere and you buy it).
What is life for this man? What awaits him? To be eventually erased it seems, blotted out without trace and forgotten as flies which we swat are forgotten. The films is terrifyingly funny in this sense, as we laugh at the empty absurdity of a life which has no story for the one living it, just a horrifying series of events which have no rational rhyme or reason, a life which the person living it accepts but does not embrace, cold in the world he finds himself occupying for a while.
This may not seem like much of a recommendation, and yet for those who are interested in have their entertainment tainted with the challenge all good art poses for us as individuals, the view of life it espouses and which we find has become entangled with our own, making things stand out in our world that we had been unable to see before which prompt questions, often disturbing, we must seek to answer, 'Buffet Froid' is definitely worth checking out, whatever your final opinion as to its meaning or worth. It asks the viewer, "and what about you? You laugh at this man's life but how is your life fundamentally different from his? Is what you're occupying yourself with before death all that less absurd?"