Aphrodite

This movie is French but the dialog is mostly English. The story takes place on a Greek island in 1914. The costumes are very nice and evocative of the period with lots of hats, frills, and ruffles. The sets are great, too (a palatial island villa with lots of gardens and statuary). The cast is very pretty, and the story is fairly interesting too. It ends rather abruptly and there is no sense of completion, but that's a small complaint. It is shot in a pretty, soft-focus way, with a very nice classical music soundtrack. Well above average for this kind of thing.

The makers of this movie wanted to make a story, late Victorian, set on a breathtakingly beautiful Greek island. But soon they realized that there was not much of a story, the actors were not good enough to spice up the dull characters. And then they remembered Caligula. It suffered from the same shortcomings, but became a best seller by the use of sex.

So sex was introduced in this movie, including a few orgy scenes. It is all soft core-on-the-edge. And that was the first mistake. It is the 80's. Nobody is shocked by naked people anymore. The second point is that all the sex doesn't really help the characters. In the beginning of the movie they don't mean anything to you, by the end of this movie you don't even care about them. The acting is partly reasonable, partly intolerable. The movie itself is smothered in pretenses.

On the positive side: a lot of attention is paid to the costumes and the settings. The actors are quite attractive. The camera work is excellent: the soft focus effect really adds to the weird atmosphere. It also works in one or two carefully filmed love scenes, filmed in a "Bilitis" David Hamilton style.

All in all this is a dreadfully boring movie, pretentious and not delivering on any level.

I rate this 3 out of 10.

Here's an odd movie. It seems to be another entry in the "Emanuelle" genre of would-be classy but often insufferably pretentious, or just plain risible, European erotica. This movie is even more pretentious than most, however. It is set on a yacht and private Greek island of a gun dealer and libertine in the last days before the start of WWI. The libertine gets his companions on the "pleasure cruise" to act out parts he has assigned them from a famous erotic play about the goddess Aphrodite. Fantasy and reality begin to merge and become indistinguishable--at least until the erotic revelry is broken by real-world historical events.

Despite this arty, historical backdrop, the raison d'etre of this particular piece de resistance is pretty clear--sex, sex, and, of course, sex. The girl cast as Aphrodite is the virginal niece of one of the older passengers (Cappucine), who is being blackmailed by the host in order to get the younger woman to participate. The niece is played by the tres luscious Valerie Kaprinsky, who has a nice long full-frontal and full-dorsal nude scene at the beginning, but otherwise stays aloof from the erotic festivities (although her much less attractive body double does briefly participate in one orgy). The sex scenes here were no doubt spiced up to some extent with near-hardcore inserts, but most of the cast, with the exception of Kaprinsky and Cappucine, do actually seem to be participating to some degree.

Still, it isn't really much of a step for Kaprinsky to appear in a borderline hardcore film like this, but what's really surprising is that this film was directed--not by someone like Roger Vadim or Just Jaeckin--but by Robert Fuest, a fairly august British director usually associated with PG-rated horror flicks like "The Abomidable Dr. Phibes" or "And Soon the Darkness". Obviously, he is a little out of his element here. This isn't as good as it wants to be or as bad as it could have been, but it definitely is strange.

Setting this piece of period drivel in 1914 suggests that the creators were trying to add significance by telling a tale of upper class decadence as Europe teetered on the brink of war, but chalk this up as another in a long list of failed ambitions for this piece of drek. Every erotic taste is featured here: voyeurism, costumes, role-playing and partner-swapping as events lead up to the main event, a re-creation of a classical Greek orgy. However, while the settings are pretty to look at, the performances are so drab, the script so lacking in energy and wit and the direction so pedestrian that it all makes for a boring, empty spectacle. Plus, the English-dubbed North American version appears to be a few minutes shorter than the European version, indicating some scissoring by censors. Avoid.

SPOILERS: The event that began World War I is mentioned here. If the movie Titanic was spoiled for people who knew the ship sunk, then my review has similar "spoilers" that are also known as basic facts of world history from the 20th century.

Set on an undisclosed European isle in the summer of 1914, this movie is part costume drama and part soft porn, with some espionage and political intrigue mixed in for good measure.

For those who've read the first book in Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series, "World's End", this will seem like old times with it's yacht cruises, painters, political discussion, and the dropping of names of many highly placed European personages, and the mentioning of the most prominent munitions manufacturers of the period, including Count Basil Zaharoff.

There is almost enough dialog, sometimes political and sometimes philosophical, to fill in the spaces between the nudity and sex, some of which is erotic, and some of which is absurd. For fans of Valerie Kaprisky, you may be disappointed after the first 10 minutes of the movie.

The film ends with the news of the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand and its importance to the main character of the film, a munitions manufacturer, which is shown next to the declaration of love by the other main characters, perhaps in some sort of suggested dichotomy of love and war within all men. But truly, it's the charm of this film that it hints at such concepts interspersed with ridiculous love scenes, and does so without any apparent shame.