Chanting Lure Tales

I've been meaning to try some Italian sex comedies. Where Giallo gets a bit of respect (and, therefore, American releases) because of its ties to horror and especially slasher movies, Italian sex comedies don't so they're hard to get a hold of.

Since La liceale is the first I watched, I can't say that this is true for all or even most Italian sex comedies, but this isn't porn. The subject matter is sexual but the level of nudity is on par with Giallo. There's lots of toplessness and butts. Maybe the occasional bush on a woman (very probably a merkin but not an obvious one).

Content note: Sexual assault in comedy.

The protagonist of the movie is Loredana. She's a high school girl. She and her classmates are all clearly 18 years old or much older. Her parents are separated ... or divorced. The movie doesn't make this clear. Her father, D'Amico (I didn't catch his first name and Wikipedia calls him by his title and his surname), is constantly having affairs with young women. Her mother, Elvira, is having a secretive affair with a widowed man named Osvaldo.

Loredana is aware of both sets of affairs but she's letting her mother think she doesn't know about Elvira's affair. A running comedic thread is Osvaldo having to hide in increasingly absurd situations because of Loredana.

At the start of the movie, Loredana is comfortable with exhibitionism and she seems to be ready for more. However, the men she's around keep going too far, too fast, and don't stop (or get really petulant) when she tells them to stop.

In one of the earliest incidents, a friend, Petruccio Sciacca, has invited her to sit for a painting he wants to do of her. She's comfortable taking her clothes off to sit for the painting, but he “loses control” as soon as he sees her naked and tries to initiate sex with her. That's not what she was there for and, after fighting him off, she leaves.

Petruccio, played by Alvaro Vitali, looks about 35 in the movie despite playing a high schooler. Vitali was actually 25 at the time of shooting, but the apparent age difference is hard to ignore considering how consequential his role is. Petruccio gets his own arc. One of their classmates takes a liking to him and begins essentially sexually assaulting him. He's not comfortable with the situation. When he tries to put her off, she asks if he's gay. He takes that as an insult to his masculinity and finally agrees to have sex ... the first time. She continues to pressure him into sex he's not comfortable with throughout the rest of the movie. The movie is playing it for laughs. “Look: the sex pest is being sexually pestered and is being pressured into having sex he doesn't want to!” It's difficult for me to get past either side of it.

In contrast, Loredana's high school love interest, Gianni, doesn't try to assault her but, when she says she doesn't want to do it right then, he becomes belligerent and drives off, leaving her walking back from the middle of nowhere.

Loredana pursues an older man named Silvi. They do have sex, but both are disappointed. He was expecting someone who wasn't a virgin, and she was expecting someone who was a little gentler. They try again and things go better. She's smitten and wants to run away with him, but he's actually married.

She gives her parents a bit of a scare thinking she's run away to be with some man but, when she finds out she can't be with Silvi, she makes her way back home and finds a familiar face: her mother's lover, Osvaldo.

Osvaldo is locked out, and she doesn't have her keys with her either so they talk. She tells him he should stand up to Elvira more and be a stronger man. He says that if he was anything than what he was, Elvira wouldn't want him. This brings Loredana to a bit of a revelation.

After making the last of several passes at her professor, Guidi, she realizes that Gianni is who she really wants. She does have something to make up for. Not the incident where he chewed her out and left her stranded, but a situation I didn't summarize here. They get back together.

It would be entirely possible to do this story today, but some of the changes required would be difficult. Neither of her professors could ethically tolerate Loredana's classroom behavior today. She distracts both professors by teasing them with hints of the crotch of her panties. She tries multiple times to get Prof. Guidi to take her to bed.

I think what the movie is getting at is that men need maturity in order not to violate consent (or be indignant little shits if they're turned down). Which is shitty by itself. Gaining maturity isn't what turns a man from a potential rapist and actual sexual assault committer to someone who's ... better than that, at least. It suggests that Loredana has to do the work of developing that maturity in someone else in order to get what she wants and needs. Which is a pretty shitty thing to put on any woman.

It also contributes to what makes this movie so difficult to recommend. The movie does have good things about it. Osvaldo is one of them. Like everyone else in the movie, he's silly and tawdry, but he has a little bit of self-awareness and that self-awareness, combined with care, leads Loredana down the path she wants to follow (however little I like it) and also leads to her chastising her parents for a bad choice they were about to waltz into.

By painting every character in the movie as silly and tawdry, the movie isn't mocking silly and tawdry people. Instead, it's inviting us to see ourselves as silly and tawdry. I think that's a useful perspective.

Note: As of the time of this writing, whoever wrote the plot summary on Wikipeida for this movie wasn't paying close attention. Loredana doesn't try to get her parents back together. She sees that her father is having thoughts of getting back together with Elvira, and she does her best to persuade both Elvira and D'Amico that it would be foolish to get back together. She makes it perfectly clear that both of them would find getting back together miserable, and they would make her miserable in turn.

#Movie #Review #ItalianSexComedy