Sexo Louco

There are eight episodes in this sex comedy. The episodes are so short that they lack development, meaning, progression and are pretty boring. Although this is a "sex" comedy, and the subject is sex, the movie is practically PG-13. The subjects of the episodes are pretty repellent, with titles like "Sex in Shantytown". The actor Giancarlo Giannini plays each of the lead roles in the episodes, and his performances are really the only reason to watch this film.

Sessomatto ("Sex Madness," but released in English as "How Funny Can Sex Be?") is comprised of a series of eight comic sketches, each on average 10-15 minutes long, all having to do with sex, and all featuring two of the giants of Italian cinema in the 1970s, Giancarlo Giannini and Laura Antonelli. The sex in the movie is pretty tame by 21st century standards, and much of its humor comes from things that would have been shocking in the 1970s but aren't any more, a lot of that humor having been diluted over time. However, what interested me most was the sharp contrast between the acting styles of the two talented leads. Giannini is consistently cartoonishly exaggerated, following in the tradition of many great comedians, from Chaplin to the Marx Brothers to Jerry Lewis to Lucille Ball, Whoopi Goldberg, Jim Carrey, and Jackie Chan. Antonelli, on the other hand, takes a completely opposite tack bu trying to ealistically portray how someone might actually act if caught in a ridiculous situation. This follows the style of equally wonderful comic actors like Carole Lombard, Jimmy Stewart, Bill Murray, Julia Roberts, and Will Smith. Antonelli is also one of the finest examples of how to act with just one's eyes. I rated this based on how most audiences will see it, which is as mildly amusing and mildly sexy. But for those with a special interest in comedy acting, I would rate it much higher: maybe even a 10.

Normally the epithet "sexy comedy" is a cinematic death knell, but the cooperation of the fantastic Laura Antonelli, Giancarlo Giannini and director Dino Risi turned this into a timeless classic. And yes, it's funny and sexy. In nine segments and probably inspired, in a good way, by Woody Allen's "What You Always Wanted To Know About Sex" which was released a year earlier.

One of the innumerable portmanteau films produced in Italy since the 1950s; many had been helmed by multiple directors and featured the most popular film stars of the time. Some other examples, however, were made by one director as a vehicle for a particular star's versatility (for instance, Nino Manfredi in Lina Wertmuller's LET'S TALK ABOUT MEN [1965]). This one, in fact, follows the latter trend and featured Giancarlo Giannini and Laura Antonelli in all (but one, in her case) nine segments. However, with the 70s, a lot of vulgarity had seeped into Italian comedy and, with a title like that, the film under review here certainly falls into this category - despite the respectable fare with which both Risi and Giannini were typically associated!

Anyway, quality varies a lot from one episode to the other: perhaps the best were Nos. 2 (concerning an overcrowded poor family, with the stars bursting into spontaneous insults every now and again), 3 (in which Giannini, married to the luscious Antonelli, actually prefers to offer sexual favors to old ladies!), 4 (Giannini is a playboy who's unstoppable in a mobile environment - trains, boats - but actually impotent in bed...so his wife proposes to use the elevator of their hotel, with tragic results!) and 8 (the longest segment and the one in which Antonelli doesn't appear, where a man goes to meet his brother - whom he hasn't seen in years - and falls for a transvestite hooker played by Alberto Lionello, with a surprising denouement). The other episodes aren't too bad, either (one, where Antonelli plays a nun[!], is spoken in gibberish and seems to have been inspired by A CLOCKWORK ORANGE [1971]) - but the repetition and, eventually, the film's considerable length becomes tiresome. Still, Armando Trovajoli's score (including its suggestive title track) is notable.

A play on words (check-mate, sex-mad, get it?), the title Sessomatto is quite accurate since most of the sketches in the movie are about sex gone berserk. I'm writing this in 2002, some 28 years after seeing the movie, so memory may fail me, but, even though this was supposed to be a vehicle for Giancarlo Giannini, I remember it mostly for the radiant beauty of Laura Antonelli. Some of the sketches definitely had some socially redeeming value and are harbingers of Dino Risi's future masterpieces (Profumo di donna, Primo Amore and, particularly, I Nuovi Mostri).