Like La Grande Bouffe, The Last Woman is a picture of monstrous male appetite, what critic Molly Haskell called "(a) fine and complex feminist film-not in riding the crest of the revolution but in observing the death rattle of an old order through its defending champions." Gérard Depardieu stars as an engineer whose wife has left him, and with good reasons which he soon begins to bestow upon a new love (Ornella Muti). An infant son also receives the benefits of papa's boundless masculine pride. But Muti isn't mute, and suggests that twenty million Frenchmen can be wrong. Après moi, le sex is called screamingly into question in what we must warn you is a Grand Guignol finish involving an electric carving knife à la Three Blind Mice. In this film, as Haskell writes, "as in La Grande Bouffe, feeling imbues the imagery so that the real and the metaphorical coalesce, and in the character played by Depardieu (sensational in this unbelievably difficult role) we see both the appeal and the horror of retrogression."