*CONTAINS REFERENCES TO
ADULT
MATERIAL*
Simona
(Serena
Grandi)
a leotard clad aerobics instructor, is bored with her marriage, and
with
her aeroplane and boxing obsessed husband Mario. Slowly Simona
lowers
herself into a world of dangerous sexual liaisons, mostly with
unknown
men. The first two liaisons she is partly taken by force, but she
does not resist, as she half desired the encounter in the first
place.
During her third such encounter, one which she is protesting at, she is
found out by her husband, who dulls the intruder's ardour with his
foot,
and then beats his wife.
This leads to an
inevitable break
up during which he retaliates to her infidelity by screwing his part
time
musician neighbour. Due to Simona's bad/good timing she finds out
about this, and hereafter refuses to return to her married life, after
her husband's persistence for her to do so.
Simona decides that
what she needs
to cure her of her potentially dangerous desires is a child. She
makes a visit to a gynaecologist (Robert from Lamberto Bava's gooey
necrophiliac
grotesquerie, Macabre/Frozen Terror/Macabro, 1980) whom has already
lain
his seed at her altar. She has her IUD removed and endeavours to
get pregnant as quickly as possible.
Simona never has full
control over
her liaisons, which means anyone of her lovers could go further than
she
would like, or had fantasized about. But she is willing to take
this
risk.
Soon after this
Simona is
subjected
to a 100% unwanted sexual assault, after which she finds out who the
rapist
was, and decides to turn her back on her licentious distractions and
return
to her former life.
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Serena Grandi (for those who may not know)
is the voluptuous queen
of spaghetti erotica. From Tinto Brass's fetishistic Miranda
(1985)
To Sergio Martino's psycho-erotic-thriller, Craving Desire (1993),
where
she unfortunately played second fiddle to Vittoria Belvedere. And
this where she again displays her ample charms, as she had in Miranda
the
year before.
The film brings to
mind G.W.
Pabst's
1929 silent masterpiece Pandora's Box, which brought the world the
beautiful
Louise Brooks (and the 'bob' hairstyle) as Lulu, though Lady Of The
Night
is nowhere near as good or as ground breaking as that. Pandora's
Box did the selfish, libertine woman thing nearly fifty years earlier,
and still packs more punch than this. And in no way was Simona
going
to get a bloody ending for her sins like Lulu did. But maybe the
cracks in the ground appear, as Lulu was lead to the slaughter for her
crimes and Simona only raped and then decided to return to the family
fold.
Maybe Pandora's Box was more a lesson in staying put than this was, and
maybe even more conventional, once you get past Lulu's
libertinage
that is!
The film seems like a
misogynist's
wet dream, rather than a plunge into the fantasies of women.
Though
there are people who fantasize and participate in such anonymous sexual
shenanigans, the rape fantasy theme is a little of a more dangerous
area
to be covering. Especially when the character turns her pretty
tail
and goes back from whence she came. And what is probably supposed
to an anti conventional, indignation raising, and ground breaking delve
into dark dangerous fantasies, turns out to be a totally conventional
lesson,
that Simona should have stayed where she was and been happy with what
she
had.
The version that was
released by
Angel
Films, in the UK, was cut by our scissor happy censors by almost 3
minutes.
Which is absolutely ludicrous considering the current climate of
censorship
in the UK. Where hard core sex scenes, including "money shots"
were
passed uncut in
Lars Von Trier's "The Idiots", and Catherine Breillat's, UK
censorship
ground breaking, but boring as hell "Romance".
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