Civilization as we know it ended a long time ago, Ferreri says sardonically in this film set in New York. Nothing sci-fi about it, but New York is post-apocalyptic, its apartments inhabited by rats and ruin. (The Bronx is up and the battery's run out.) Two Europeans-free-spirited man/boy Gérard Depardieu and ancient asthmatic Marcello Mastroianni-are singularly ill-equipped to make sense of this "new barbarian age" but that doesn't stop them trying. Their cohorts include James Coco as a Roman wax-museum curator, and Geraldine Fitzgerald as a sexy senior. As in The Last Woman (also set amid inhuman highrises), Depardieu's Lafayette in NYC finds himself amid brave new sex roles, with only the eponymous pet monkey to train into his idea of manhood. A felled figure of King Kong found on a riverside beach says a lot about breastbeating masculinity in the post-modern age-and something about Ferreri's penchant for the bizarre, as well.