An unhappily married man dotes on his young daughter, but is turned off by his feminist wife. He wants to cheat but is unable to make it with slutty bar girls or prostitutes. Then he meets a young stenography student (Eleanora Giorgi) who is wandering alone through a park where a lot of other young people are making out. When they first make love, she reveals that she has a masochistic streak by putting a sharp knife to her bare breast. After that their relationship gets increasingly perverse and borderline abusive as he gets her to suck his toes in the bathttub, pretend to be a prostitute and perform oral sex on a random guy, have sex with another woman while watches through a peephole, and even confront his wife at an abortion rally.
Obviously, this movie wants to be a kind of "Last Tango in Paris", but the male protagonist is definitely not Marlon Brando. He basically comes off as a shallow and abusive cad (and the film seems to draw uncomfortable parallels between his relationship with his young mistress and with his own five-year-old daughter). Of course, it's easy to see how someone might get bored with having plain old vanilla sex with the ravishing Giorgi--after say, oh, about 10,000 years or so--and have to resort to all these degrading games. The Giorgi character,on the other hand, isn't given a lot of back story or any real motivation at all for getting involved with this married loser. But I suppose no one is probably going to complain too much about character motivation--not when Giorgi appears in her full-frontal glory about every ten minutes on average.
Giorgi was an interesting actress. Like Ornella Muti and Moncia Guerritori, she mostly appeared in classy or pseudo-classy Eurpean "art" films like this, whereas many of her peers (like Gloria Guida and Lila Carati) tended to appear more in genre movies or low-brow sexploitative comedies, or kind of went back and forth between the two (like Agostina Belli and Jenny Tamburi). What all these actresses had in common though was that they were all achingly beautiful, at least modestly talented, and would shed their clothes at the drop of a fedora. Strangely, out of this impressive group, only Ornella Muti achieved international stardom (although Agostina Belli came close). Giorgi's most famous role was probably in Dario Argento's "Inferno". Her most memorable film perhaps though was "Appasionata" where she plays a high school girl who seduces her best friend's father. (It's very similar to this one, but considerably better). I've seen five or six of her films and this is probably the weakest, but if you like gorgeous, undraped Italian girls from the 70's (and who doesn't?), by all means check it out. . .
