Bye Bye Monkey

In a decaying, near-future New York, Gérard Lafayette works as a lighting technician for a feminist theatre troupe and as an electrician at a wax museum devoted to ancient Rome. His life takes a turn when a chimpanzee infant comes into his hands, left to him by an Italian vagrant named Luigi Nocello, and he decides to adopt and raise the animal as if it were his own child. Around him move the museum's obsessive director, the lonely Luigi, and the actress Angelica, with whom he becomes involved.

Marco Ferreri directed the film, working from a screenplay he wrote with Gérard Brach and Rafael Azcona. It came roughly midway through the run of features listed for him, five years after La Grande Bouffe and well before How Good the Whites Are. Gérard Depardieu plays Lafayette, with Marcello Mastroianni as Luigi, alongside James Coco, Abigail Clayton, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Stefania Casini. The Italian-French co-production, made by Action Films and Prospectacle, runs 113 minutes.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.3 from about 1,500 votes, and on TMDB a rating of 6.2 from a much smaller base of 45 votes. The two averages sit close together, indicating a modest but reasonably consistent level of viewer approval for a title that has never drawn a large audience.