Gabriele Lavia
Scandalosa Gilda

Hello people (just to change it up), one genre I have incidentally dealt with in previous reviews and various comments is the "Italian erotic" genre, which has its "champion" in Tinto Brass and his actresses (or rather a part of them, the rear part), but also valid lesser epigones who have learned the rudiments of the genre from the Venetian master, even intuitively.

However, it would be predictable to deal with these minors, and thus, let's avoid predictability and see how a great of Italian theater like the acclaimed Gabriele Lavia, here as director and protagonist, confronts the same genre - with a film whose female totem is represented by the then wife of the Hamletian author, the truly beautiful, to avoid being vulgar, Monica Guerritore.

Here I open a parenthesis, hopefully shared: in my opinion, the young Guerritore, besides being talented, was truly one of the most intriguing and sensual women of our cinema and theater, a small and somewhat underrated icon of Mediterranean eros. This especially when she kept her hair black and long - as in the later "La lupa" ('9*), a bit less when she had it short and light as here, but let's make do.

Getting to the point, "Scandalosa Gilda" ('85) is a genuine mess, indefensible if not for some nude scenes of our Monica: the story appears inherently scarcely credible even by erotic cinema standards, telling the tale of the progressive ruin of a comic strip artist (Lavia), hopelessly in love with the unfaithful Gilda (Guerritore). Eros and Thanatos walk hand in hand as in the best classical tradition, up to a dramatic - or ridiculous? - finale.

The film poorly mixes fragments of eroticism, traits of a road movie, and even cartoons, before even Tarantino in "Kill Bill": the sequence drawn by someone named Gibba, narrating the erotic adventures of a Vagina (I'm not joking), turns out to be at least original, although somewhat vulgar and in certain aspects gratuitous. The acting is terrible, even the actors themselves seem unconvinced of what they are doing, except in the part related to a few erotic scenes.

In short, a horrible film even for your Il_Paolo, who nonetheless doesn't bother you on Debaser just to tell you this work is practically to be thrown away, something the sharpest would have understood from the title.

No, obviously the discussion must be broader. A few years ago, before the couple split, I saw Lavia and Guerritore in theater, in a rather harsh version of some Shakespearean tragedy whose name I don't exactly remember, lasting about three and a half hours. They were brilliant, able to simultaneously convey art and culture and to elevate, in the humble opinion of your reviewer and occasional trusted theater spectator, the not always high level of theatrical representations in Italy.

Now, excluding that Lavia took advantage of the film to enjoy his wife's charms (I understand Brass who is a bit of a lecher, but not him), and equally excluding that the Turin artist had the taste to stage some lubricious private desires, I have to conclude that this lousy film was made for poorly placed commercial needs, or to exploit, in the wake of "La chiave" of Brassian memory ('83), the softcore genre all'amatriciana. To avoid being too predictable and vulgar, Lavia and Guerritore added some tones of impending tragedy and some cartoonish experimentation that resembles quite a bit the fig leaf of Adamic memory, saying it all about the genesis of the film.

Well, retrieving this film, and watching it disenchanted - casting a sidelong glance at the full nudity of the beautiful Monica - means understanding, all in all, what it costs to make culture in Italy, and also to do theater: one must lower oneself a bit to the commercial needs and to the audience that doesn't even know who the Bard was. That's life, while I wonder what would have happened if Lavia had not reached the same conclusions, but Paola Borboni had.

Theatrically Yours

Il_Paolo