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Little Annie Fanny at the villa, a randy intermezzo between Macbeth and Chinatown. "No rape?" "Oh no no no, I'm very lucky. I always meet nice people like you." The American hitchhiker (Sydne Rome) is a half-dressed lamb amid continental wolves, her introduction finds her escaping only because the short-sighted hooligans almost penetrate each other by mistake. The Italian cottage is a sun-dappled labyrinth, with a jungle for a garden and a Bacon painting in the bedroom. The ex-pimp (Marcello Mastroianni) pads in bathrobe and shades, then dons buried uniforms and feral skins and experiences the fetishist's frustration of a guileless partner. (Before Monty Python, "a tiger in Africa? Are you sure?") A fairytale in the Stroheim mold, gorgeous and dirty, and there's Roman Polanski in front of the camera wielding a harpoon as a reprobate named Mosquito. A Lewis Carroll gallery, including an aging lecher with a Mozart fugue (Romolo Valli) and "a wonderful old tyrant, like Michelangelo's Moses" (Hugh Griffith). Oneiric repetitions for Goldilocks, just a little déjà vu to set off the Rosemary's Baby dream effects. Moonlight by the shore, rockers and tourists, the crushed ping-pong ball, all part of a romp cracked by anxiety and mania. The host comes to prefer life to art and turns down a Géricault, he expires happily at the sight of the heroine bare. Down the cable car and into the truck full of pigs, the only way out is the movie ending. "Questo è un manicomio!" Bertolucci has a gauzy variant in Stealing Beauty. With Guido Alberti, Gianfranco Piacentini, Christiane Barry, Pietro Tordi, Henning Schlüter, Carlo Delle Piane, and Alvaro Vitali.
--- Fernando F. Croce |