Customer Reviews

Devil in the Flesh

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It's a shame this is not available on video because this is actually one of the better rites of passage movies involving a young student and older woman. Usually the stuff of dreck, this movie has a terrific performance by Maruschka Detmers as a mercurial soon-to-be bride who falls in love(?) with a student. She is a real presence and raises this film to "gentle fable" status. Please come back to availability status soon.

I give this movie four stars because Maruschka Detmers is so cute, otherwise it would only rate a three.
The story is plausible; Woman falls for a younger guy while her fiancee is in jail. The sex scenes are hot, and indeed, one is actually explicit.
However the end is lacking. It leaves you with the question: Is that all?
It is worth watching, at least once

Each scene is one shot, and that shot goes on and on and on, sometimes staying with the same act or lack of action. This film is pretension personified, but that's okay. Many people can't tell the difference between pretension and art. The music too is full of squeaks and squawks. In case you didn't know, that means that the music too is high art.

There is no story. Boy and girl see each other, and without preliminaries hit the sack. We see boy & girl here, there, in the sack, here, there, in the sack, etc. Occasionally we get a shot of some of the other characters.

Because of the lack of dynamics, the film is not effective, either as drama or as eroticism. Ironically, "The Summer of '42" was much more erotic even without any nudity (which would have helped).

The vaulted sex scenes are three in number, chest and shoulders, and they last about three minutes each. The much-touted fellatio scene is actually surprisingly good, more convincing than the "love" scenes.

There are also a few brief full-frontal scenes of the star, who has a gorgeous body (hence, the two star rating).

Bottom line: the only reason to see this movie is the nudity and the sex. But there are many better movies for that. So, only if you need the pretentiousness in order to permit yourself to see a sex movie should you see this.

This is a film about the power of erotic love. He's young and naive and doesn't care how hopeless and destructive his affair with this older woman might be. She's older and fully aware of the danger, but not totally at the helm of her own ship; given to bouts of melancholy and psychosis.

Check out the film's last scene: He's there being examined by his professors, and she's there watching him in a growing state of emotion. Watch the expressions on her face (God, what a performance!) and you'll see that she realizes just how much she'll lose by falling in love with this young man but, simulataneously, just how powerless she is to resist the passion, love, lust, self-destruction. I love this film.

Bellocchio refers to this as a mainly political movie, a description of the revolutionary movement in Italy, but that seems more metaphor than reality. Well, almost everything in the movie seems like metaphor. The revolutionaries, of whom we see and about whom we learn very little, might as well be mafiosi. Out with the old and in with the new.

Andrea's Papa, a psychoanalyst, seems to stand for the usual traditional bourgeois values -- morally upright, unperturbed, clean and tidy, thoroughly ritualized.

Giullia, the girlfriend of a revolutionary, seems to represent what can happen to someone who needs very badly a cause to support but is unable to muster up the kind of devotion such a commitment demands. (I'm guessing here.) Andrea, the adolescent boy, seems to be the only guy in the movie who is not in some unquiet way "upatz." He's respectful of his father but disobedient too. He loves Giullia, or so we assume, although he's not really old enough to have learned how to manage his reflexes optimally, but he leaves her in order to show up at school and complete his final exams. His course between these contradictory lifestyles could be described as "media." He's the man in between, who knows the meaning of gradualism, who can keep his cool while those about him are screaming.

Most of this is summed up during the oral part of his finals when he is asked to translate and comment on an excerpt from "Antigone," which contrasts the traditional authority of the gods with the notion of secularity and free will.

That brings us -- by no particular course that I'm aware of -- to Marushka Detmars. She brings to mind a New Yorker cartoon of a few years ago. Two hippos are neck-deep in the river, staring at a gazelle drinking from the bank, and one hippo says to the other, "I hate her." She's a good actress. (Let me get that out of the way.) But so is everyone else in the film. She carries with her, in her speech and manner, the rich glitter of outright lunacy. And it all comes from the actress too, not from directorial aid. Detmars isn't nuts the way Catherine DeNeuve was nuts in "Repulsion." The walls don't turn to rubber and grow hands. Instead, we see her animated -- sometimes TOO animated. And she gives us shocking jolts when her mood abruptly changes and becomes threatening the way a looming thunderstorm crackles with lightning.

A critic described her as sultry, but that's probably not the word he was searching for. She's compellingly beautiful with her fluffy brown hair, her wide white ready grin, her impulsive giggles. And her eyes are like the eyes in the paintings on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs. The sexy parts are pretty erotic, not so much because one of them is explicit, but because we've gotten to know the characters involved. (It's more interesting to spy on the honeymoon couple next door than go to a skin flick.) Actually there isn't THAT much sex. There is only one scene of simulated intercourse but the director lets it play out in what seems to be real time. At least real time for an eighteen-year-old boy.

The young man who plays Andrea is fine too, which is a necessary thing, because the film depends almost entirely on him and Giullia. They have to carry it and they do. If it were not for their performances, I'm not sure this would be as interesting or as admirable flick as it is. It could easily have been turned into a rather slow, boring romance.

Worth having.

This is an amazing movie, very balanced, all details thought out, as perfect as can be. Marco Bellochio sketches, on the mere pretence of using the story by Radiguet, using the setting of Italy in the years of 'the strategy of tension',a pathology that in those years not even had the name of 'borderline', nor was recognized as such. With long shots, he forces his main actor, the Dutch Maruschka, to the max. She gives an incredable rendering of this type of person. Moreover, she is so beautiful, her laugh is so enticing (and foreboding the worst), that you will never forget her, nor the story. Marco Bellochio is one of the few film directors who have never yielded to commerce. He is a gran maestro, one of the greatest. You can see this movie again and again, it never will deluse you. It has a slow development of tension that will keep you entranced.

Good thing I watched this film without checking the Amazon comments first, otherwise I might have decided to skip it due to its 4-star rating. This is the real deal, you cinephiles. Great acting, meaningful story, tension that builds CREDIBLY on several levels, and consistently high standard of attention to details. Check this out, the future mother in law of the female protagonist talks with the father of the male protagonist about the latter's son's messing around with her soon to be daughter in law. Hey, if you can read this sentence ignore all reviews about this film's not having a story, etc. To return to the dialog between the two and the dynamic among all 4 who know of each other's positions/relations, it's all so natural and adult-like that is makes you drop all skepticism/resistance. The erotic scenes are masterful in themselves, don't let minors whom you cannot explain be around while watching this--for example, 'Basic Instinct' is cartoonish by comparison.

Now, from the extras, you learn about the significance this film has in Bellocchio's artistic output, as well as two interviews with women whose sexual lives were affected by their political/activist choices in the Italy of the '70s. You understand that this film is based on real drama, distilled and delivered in art form, for otherwise it might have been unbearable.

From the other comments, I gathered that you also have to watch the "No Shame"-2005 edition of the DVD; I was lucky to watch this one and have no regrets.

Its really an Italian version of The Graduate with some twisty sub-plots. Naturally these foreign films will be a bit more sexual, and this one does has one scene with oral action in it(certainly not as graphic as the cross-over film 'the image'). Overall my 3 star rating is perhaps a bit conservative, its good but don't expect to be 'blown' away.

This film will stand as one of those revolutionary films that caused quite a stir in the wake of "Last Tango in Paris." Quite simple in its plot, but unforgettable characters.

i liked this movie. it is a story of a girl who is very mischievious and full of fun. she is bored and gets into trouble. it has a scene of explicit sex and is not for children. i would reccomend it.