Unscrupulous

It's a quite old film. And I don't know well about cast and crew. But it's very well directed and you know, it has a typical story and scenes that you want from Italian romantic films. Sandra Wey, the actress looks lovely and she's gorgeous. I didn't see much Italian movies, but this is the best among the few.

Tonino Valerii was an excellent director of Westerns, including the classic MY NAME IS NOBODY, after serving an apprenticeship with Sergio Leone. Fast forward a decade or two and we have Italy in its periodic film crisis, and he's reduced to directing (and not very well at that) softcore porn.

It's amusing and simultaneously depressing that the only commenter on IMDb for this film thus far calls it the best Italian movie he's ever seen, conceding he hasn't seen many. That's the problem in a nutshell -a modern audience no longer exposed to (or interested in) quality Italian films, and so evaluating them in a vacuum.

The clichés of the genre are well-established, with marital infidelity the core of the plot. Sandra Wey is Silvia, married to an Italian jewelry big shot who neglects her. A masked burglar Diego (hammy Marzio Honorato) breaks into her home while hubby is away at a conference, rapes her, and steals an expensive print hanging on the wall. When hubby Massimo (Antonio Marsino, an actor who got his start in Westerns, here phoning in his performance) returns he is not only unsympathetic about her having been raped, but accuses her of telling the burglar that the print was valuable! Film briefly takes an even darker turn (before going off the rails) when distraught Silvia visits her parents for help, and both shoo her away ("too busy"). Where's a girl to turn?

This being porn, even of the full-frontal-nudity/simulated sex variety, she ends up bonding with the rapist. Yes, I've heard of the Stockholm Syndrome and am a big fan of Cavani's classic THE NIGHT PORTER, but Valerii bungles this gimmick with tired-blood direction. The twists and turns of her relationship with Diego are never credible and just used to keep the plot boiling, leading her to become more-or-less part of his criminal gang, first robbing a friend's villa of rare coins and ultimately robbing a bank.

Attempt at pathos in the climactic scene is ridiculous, and the stupid film ends with a now cynical Silvia finally leaving her husband for a new life with the parting shot: "I'll be unscrupulous".

Real pornographers often add a bit of style, and even eroticism, to this sort of thing. But when a formerly successful director like Valerii goes slumming, the results are boring and pointless. Wey is pretty but you can see her career went nowhere after starring in the plum (at the time) title role in Cannon Group's sequel THE STORY OF O PART II.