According to Penelope Gilliatt, writing in The New Yorker, The Last Woman is “a portrait of male-chauvinist swinishness as a cartoonist might draw it. The actor playing the emblematic human animal - Gerard Depardieu, called Gerard in the story - emerges with honor and bravery in his depiction of some of the more dishonorable and craven characteristics of man.... If one can cope with the ferocity of his metaphors, both The Grande Bouffe and The Last Woman are films with serious themes about monstrous distortions of human appetite. The hero stands for inordinate masculine pride, playing with his child only because he is a son; his girl stands for woman-as-object, painfully putting up with his insults.”