La gatta in calore

Splendid and unusual giallo with a statuesque performance from Eva Czemerys who is the lady who 'descends into hell', well gets off with the guy next door and then into more than she can cope with.

Cue a dose of LSD and the subsequent trip and 'descent' into a fantastically realised orgy and more. The film is not like this all the time, indeed it is a very measured affair with not that much happening, but it is a brooding, mournful piece, helped enormously by great, if not that original, score from Gianfranco Plenizio.

By turns, creepy, amusing, sexy and thrilling, this is a wonderful discovery.

La Gatta in calore deals with the torments of a couple crushed by its daily routine. Antonio (Silvano Tranquilli, Una Farfalla con le ali insanguinate) is an engineer always on the road, his wife Anna (Eva Czemerys, L'Arma l'ora il movente) staying at home, and after 8 years of marriage they still don't have any children. Neglected by her husband and boring herself while waiting, she observes the arrival of a tumultuous neighbour, Massimo (Anthony Fontane), a painter (like in Il Dolce Corpo di Deborah), whom misconducts repulse and fascinate her. When she finds a note evoking a possible infidelity of her husband, she gets nearer the available and charming Massimo, and when he is violently assaulted by two thugs in a Porsche for a drug affair, she comes to help him, they kiss each other and begin a relationship.

The film is built through a series of flashbacks, for from the beginning, after the traditional inaugural trip in Antonio's Maserati, we know that she has shot Massimo with a bullet in the head: her coming home husband finds his body in the garden, and then listens to her telling the drama story. The links between Anna and Massimo, after a short time of freedom and recklessness, with "the illusion of always being twenty", has quickly deteriorated, for the search of love of a bourgeois wife can't fit with the turmoils of an artist seeking his inspiration in drugs and excesses, and painting "the works of a mad man", as grumbles the caretaker of the housings (Renato Pinciroli, Cosi dolce cosi perversa).

Soon Massimo involves Anna in his orgy evenings with his friends (among them Ada Pometti, Quattro Mosche di velluto grigio, and Sergio Serafini, La Corta Notte delle bambole di vetro), real pandemonium of drug and sex, seeing just in her "a female cat in heat", at her great despair. Was her husband aware of the situation? Has she got lost in vain? Should she find love or destruction? Events rush during a particularly restless night, until the epilogue of this passion drama.

In this off-beat giallo Silvano Tranquili plays a workaholic husband who returns home from yet another long trip away from his wife to find a dead body lying in his front garden, and his wife sitting at a dining table with a gun in front of her. Curiously, he wants to know what's happened, and when his wife declares she still loves the dead guy lying in the garden, it makes for a lengthy flashback that makes up a lot of the film.

You see, Silvano is so engrossed in his work that he's been neglecting his wife Anna, even to the point when he falls asleep during one of their 'special nights', right before he heads off for another business trip. Anna feels a bit put out, and finds herself increasingly attracted to her jerk neighbour, a drug-filled hippy artist who regularly has vocal, naked arguments with his various girlfriends. As she keeps spying on him getting it on in his sparse living room, it also becomes apparent that he knows she's watching him.

Interspersed with this story unfolding is Silvano's reaction to all this, and his attempts to hide the body from various nosy neighbours, especially the caretaker who is always mooching about. For a story that involves two people sitting across from each other talking, this is all bizarrely engaging.

Back pre-dead guy, we see Anna and her neighbour Massimo hit it off big style, getting it on and doing that romantic thing people do in seventies films where they chase after each other on a beach while giggling. This is all nice until Massimo starts displaying a really dark side which is aggravated by booze and drugs, which has him have two of his stinking hippy girlfriends strip Anna while he thinks of a novel use for an empty coke bottle...

Indeed, by this point I was thinking Anna wasn't very good in her choice of men as she now has to get away from Massimo while hiding all this nonsense from her husband. This leads to some very tense scenes as Massimo begins to psychologically torture Anna, branding her a cat in heat while his stinking, jobless, mooching, drug addicted, clap-ridden, flea bitten, rag-wearing, flag-burning, toothless, stained, sullied, snot-caked, jaundiced, shoeless, uppity, idealistic, opportunistic, hypocritical hippy friends howl like cats.

Folks who reckon gialli plots exclusively belong to the 'people getting stabbed up by a mystery killer' will be tragically let down by this and may even attempt suicide, but those who can't be bothered creating sub-genres for every single minute deviation will realise that the mystery element to this one is rather good, if you can take that crazy ending. I've been after this one for ages, so who knows how I missed it as it's been sitting on Youtube since 2016!

Those who want blood and gore might want to skip this one, however.

There exist, generally speaking, two types of Gialli. The type with the black-gloved serial killer butchering scantily clad fashion models or lewd women, and the type revolving around a bickering and adulterous couples conspiring to murder each other. The classics of the genre are to be found in the first category, while the other type contains a few hidden gems but no real masterpieces.

"La Gatta in Calore" resides in the second category (the adultery/conspiracy category), and despite a few intriguing elements and a compelling narrative structure, I can't refer to it as a hidden treasure, unfortunately. A workaholic man (Silvano Tranquilo - "The Bloodstained Butterfly") neglects his beautiful young wife to the point that he even falls asleep on their one and only romantic night before another business trip. When he returns home again, he finds the dead body of an attractive young man in their garden, and his wife Anna at the kitchen table with a gun in front of her. What has happened here and isn't the husband partially to blame?

The main reason why "La Gatta in Calore" kept my attention is because the story is largely told in flashback-format, and because Eva Czemerys is an attractive and sexy lady! The erotic games she plays with her lover are quite enticing, and there's also a very interesting sequence that explains the peculiar title (Cat in Heat). The pacing is incredibly slow, though, and there nearly isn't enough action. The climax is beyond ridiculous.