A young girl (Lara Wendel)comes back from boarding school to care for her ill widower father (Franco Nero). He begins to recover and she begins to fall in love with him. She tries to seduce him. He resists. He meets an older woman (Dalila DiLazzaro). It all ends badly.
This another entry in the strange 70's Italian genre of "incestuous family" films. This particular film deals with potential father-daughter incest, a subject more taboo than the usually cousin-lovin' or niece-lust themes in most of these films, or even the teenage boy-young stepmother theme of Salvatore Samperi's "Malizia", the film that seemingly started this very odd genre. This is, however, a pretty well-made and tasteful film. Franco Nero always brings a lot of class to all the films he is in. Lara Wendel is an unusual actress in that she was fairly ordinary looking and actually about the same age at the time as most of the young characters she played (most of these kind of roles were played by twenty-year-old beauties like Ornella Muti or Nastassia Kinski). She was also an underrated actress, who began her career in a notorious film with Eva Ionesco, and ended it in a string of cheap Italian horror movies (the best of which is Argento's "Tenebrae"), but she is especially good in "Desideria", Samperi's "Ernesto" (where she plays male and female twins) and this. Dalila DiLazzaro is most famous for playing the female monster in "Flesh for Frankenstein" and a murdered hooker in the superb giallo "The Pyjama Girl Case". She too appeared in an Argento film, "Phenomenon" as the mistress of a Swiss boarding school.
There is one rather risqué, but not very graphic scene, where Wendel's character crawls in bed with her father and starts masturbating "in her sleep". But aside from some brief toplessness and some diaphanous nightgowns, this a less "sexy" role than "Desideria" or even some of her horror films (like the "Exorcist" rip-off "Ring of Darkness" where Wendel played a gratuitously naked version of Linda Blair). Nero and the gorgeous DiLazzaro meanwhile both keep their clothes on and don't even have an on-camera sex scene. Despite it's very risqué subject matter, this is a much more serious than sexy movie. Not the most believable film about father-daughter relationships perhaps, but not wholly unbelievable either, and it's certainly redeemed by some good acting from the three leads.
