Femina Ridens, aka The Laughing Woman (Italy, 1969)

Ok, ladies, a question for you: Who among you would not feel that a lifetime of male domination and constant humiliation would be a fair trade for being the kept woman of a wealthy, narcissistic pervert? Hmm, let’s see… all of you? Alright, then.

Granted, that’s not a very appropriate question to ask at this particular cultural moment. But I had to ask, because that type of man-up/woman-down relationship is a constant fixation of Western popular culture, even as the audience for it shifts. After all, the Fifty Shades of Gray novels and their screen adaptations are squarely aimed at the women folk, essentially being modern day bodice-rippers offering Harlequin Romance with a Desadean twist (with a nice dose of wealth porn thrown in for good measure.) But such stories have traditionally been engineered with an eye toward male titilation—from John Fowles’ The Collector¸ the many iterations of The Story of O, and, in the mainstream, 9 1/2 Weeks, and even Pretty Woman. Each of these works posits the existence of an actual human woman who finds having her sexuality bought and paid for by a man of means somehow liberating. The appeal of this idea to the masculine ego is not too mysterious, but to women? Could it be that this world is such a dangerous place for women that some of them would pay any price—forfeiting their dignity, even their humanity--to be protected from it by a buffer of wealth and privilege? I’m looking at you, Melania.

This fantasy is so powerful that even a film like Femina Ridens, which seems to pride itself on subverting that power, cannot do so without delivering a lot of fan service to the raincoat crowd. Granted, as sexploitation films from the late 60s and 70s go, Femina Ridens (aka The Laughing Woman, but released by Radley Metzger in an English dub under the telling moniker The Frightened Woman) is pretty tame. Which is to say that, if it were Japanese, there would be enemas in it. And maybe eels.

As it is, the film sticks with a pretty literal expression of sado-masochism, which seems to be the default fetish of Western fiction. It seems hard for popular cinema to imagine any type of off-kilter sexual proclivity that does not involve someone hurting someone else or being hurt by them. Apparently, though the range of human fetishes is limitless, those fetishes’ appeal to straight society is limited to those that serve us up with a heady cocktail of sex and violence. In other words, no one is going to pay to see a movie in which a beautiful woman is absconded with by a mysterious count with a diaper fixation. But, of course, that’s just a choice, not the result of sexual violence being any kind of broad cultural fetish, or anything like that.

Femina Ridens stars A Hatchet For the Honeymoon’s Dagmar Lassander as Mary, a pretty young journalist who, after succumbing to a drugged highball, finds herself decorously imprisoned within the pushbotton-everything, mid-century modern dreamhouse of Sayer, a wealthy philanthropist played by The Night Porter’s Phillipe Leroy. Here she is subjected to constant ritual humiliation, as well as Sayer’s constant voyeuristic gaze. Sayer, it turns out has a lot of interesting (read: paranoid) ideas about female liberation, seeing the movement's first tentative steps as the prelude to a full on insurrection that will see the removal of men from the birthing process and their eventual extermination. Thus Mary, an educated and assertive young career woman, becomes his stand-in for the feminine gender as a whole, setting the stage for the archetypal battle to come.

Some of Sayer’s methods are boilerplate movie psycho stuff—chopping off Mary’s hair, whipping her, soaking her with a firehose, etc.—but others are more peculiar. At one point he tapes her mouth shut and forces her to watch as he slathers half a baguette with marmalade and eats it. At another, he shows her a hogtied female figure in constricting bondage gear that’s suspended from the ceiling, only to reveal that it is only a mannequin. He also forces Mary to make love to a mannequin version of himself and, later, makes her play a chamber organ as he fondles her body invasively. But by far his creepiest contrivance is a double bed divided in half by a moving panel, which he sometimes draws back to reveal to Mary that he has been lying beside her during a moment of presumed privacy, to drive home that he is always watching.

Throughout all of this, Phillipe Leroy, while indulging in all the evil chuckling and delivering of maniacal proclamations we all expect, takes pains to show us Sayer’s pathetic insecurity and preening self-absorption. It becomes obvious that his fantasies of coming female domination are  expressions of his anxiety over his own waining physical prowess, as exemplified by a scene in which he forces Mary to watch him do naked pull-ups from a bar suspended over his bathtub. It’s easy to imagine that his fetishes are the only way that this sad beast can get off, as there is nothing about him that doesn’t scream impotence (in an early scene, he angrily castigates Mary for her views on male sterilization as a means of birth control.) At times, Mary seems to be aware of this fact, and tries to sell Sayer on the idea of romantic love and mutually pleasurable sex. When this fails, she tries to exert the natural power that she, by virtue of her sexuality, holds over him, at one point preforming a topless go-go dance in her quarters, all the while aware that he is watching inertly from the other side of a two-way mirror.

And then, after Sayer revives Mary following a suicide attempt, love blossoms between the two—with results as chilling as anything we’ve seen so far. I’m talking about scenes of the couple frolicking in the fields and cuddling in the shower as whimsical music plays. This inexcusable audience torture ends with a scenic trip by amphicar to a seaside castle where Mary laughingly cajoles Sayer into overindulging on fried oysters. But amid all this lovey-dovey frivolity, one has to ask oneself—or Femina Ridens director Piero Schivazappa, if he happens to be in the room—whether Mary’s affections are real, or if she is just playing on Sayer’s feelings to her advantage. You might, in fact, ask yourself ..


…HAS THE HUNTER BECOME THE PREY???

Another inopportune thing about the current cultural moment is that it prevents me from discussing a silly movie like Femna Ridens with the flippancy it deserves. Because, despite whatever subversive--or even feminist--intentions its makers might have had, it is indeed very silly—and it is silly because it undermines those very intentions in two ways that are directly tied to how much it conforms to the practices of the typical European sexploitation film of its day. For one thing, while it’s fun to look at Francesco Cuppini's ultra-mod production design  and groove to Stilvio Cipriani’s slick, pop-inflected (and excellent) score, both of those elements are aggressively employed to embue Sayer’s money-driven world of decadent excess with a seductive glamour, and, while Mary’s turning the tables is a foregone conclusion, it appears to be a conclusion that the film's male creators have some ambivalence about.

It also has to be said that the filmmakers do themselves no favors with a couple of instances of  laughably on-the-nose symbolism--which, to be honest, is what a lot of us watch these old Italian exploitation films for. The first occurs during the pair's romantic idyll, when Sayer pulls his car over beside some railroad tracks to receive some road head from Mary. As she goes to town on him below the camera's view, an engine passes by towing a flatbed car bearing an all female band. A close-up shows us the clarinetist salaciously mouthing her instrument. Get it? It's exactly the kind of seedy, winking coyness that makes hardcore porn seem wholesome by comparison.

Another of the film's blunt force metaphors is the statue of a giant pair of spread female legs with a vagina dentata at its nexus. At the film's opening, a group of business men are seen filing listlessly into its maw and then,  at a pivotal moment, Sayer himself is seen stepping inside, only to emerge as a skeleton. This less than subtly signifies the moment at which Mary goes from being the victim to the femme fatale.

On the other hand, thanks to some goofy musical cues (babbadabbadip-doowah!) and sound effects, plus a few instances of romantic slapstick, the film at times adopts a tone that is downright breezy. This is typical of the European ‘sex romps” of the day, which positioned themselves as clarions of the Sexual Revolution, spreading the word that sex was no longer something to be taken seriously, that it was instead something fun… even zany! And sadly, Femina Ridens was not the only of these films to portray as fun and zany sex that was practiced upon those without agency or choice, or used, in tandem with wealth, to callously exploit them. (I can’t help recalling the running gag in When Women Lost Their Tales concerning how Senta Berger is routinely gang raped—zanily!--by her caveman companions.)

Now I’m not saying it’s not possible to surrender to Femina Ridens’ charms and simply enjoy it as a stylish piece of European pop cinema, which it is. I’m just saying that, to do that, and then turn around and write about it as if it's not problematic on a number of levels, would be an act of bad faith I’m not ready to commit, no matter how sprightly the soundtrack. And so I gaze forlornly through the window at the kids on the other side of the pane, the ones without scruples, who happily cavort in the sprinkler while jazzy Italian pop music plays, shouting out bad words like “boobs” and “tushie” with gleeful abandon. Sigh.

Embrujada, aka Bewitched (Argentina, 1969)

Many men of a much coarser nature than me might look at Isabel Sarli’s body and declare it good for only one thing. And if you guessed “baby making”, then congratulations: you are Armando Bo, writer and co-director of Embrujada.

I have seen far from all of Bo’s obsessive paeans to his lover Sarli’s generous pulchritude, but I’m sure that none of them are as abundant in cray cray as Embrujada. This is a film in which Sarli portrays a woman who so desperately wants to have a baby that her maternal urges summon forth a literal monster. How do we know that she wants to have a baby, you probably don’t ask? Well, when we meet her at the film’s opening, she is in a toy store purchasing a baby doll, which she then takes home and tearfully holds to her enormous bosom. And this is only the first indication of the astonishing level of condescension that Bo brings to his depiction of Sarli’s character throughout the picture.

The problem is that Sarli’s character, Ansise, is married to Leandro (Daniel de Alvarado), a despotic lumber baron with a malfunctioning pee pee. This means that we get to see scenes of Leandro futilely humping the leg of a supine Isabel Sarli while weeping. In fact, if watching a voluptuous woman have blighted sex with catastrophically ugly old men is your thing, you can put those worn Ron Jeremy tapes away, because Embrujada is the only film you will ever need from now on. And, no, we are not spared the sight of their pale, flabby buttocks flouncing away on top of her, so strap in.

As with Bo’s other films, one of  Ebrujada's greatest pleasures is seeing actors throatily declaim the most absurdly overwrought dialogue imaginable with an almost self-immolating passion. Thusly, much audible hay is made of Leandro being “useless” as a man by both Ansise and himself. Leandro, however, is not being entirely on the level, as we later learn that his business works just fine when serviced by Peralta (Miguel A. Olmos), the sadistic foreman of whom he has made a boy toy.

Such betrayals, however, will have to be the subject of later hair tearing, as right now the priority for Ansise is getting someone to put a baby in her and fast. The route she takes toward this goal is a novel one. She first consults a witch, to little apparent result, and then becomes a hooker—which I suppose is a fairly direct path to parenthood if you don’t mind your baby coming with a side order of syphilis. Her first customer is a hirsute man-hag whom Leandro walks in on her with. Much glass-rattling lamentation and self-recrimination follows.

Finally, Leandro hires a workman with a less eye-punishing countenance than the other males in Embrujada, and he is played by Bo’s son, Victor, who we also saw getting it on with Sarli in The Virgin Godess. Which is to say that the two of them get it on here also. Love blossoms between the pair, only to be struck down by tragedy—that tragedy being the appearance of a rapey demon thing from South American folklore called the Pombero. The Pombero is traditionally referred to as being small in stature, but here he is a normal sized dude in a drugstore devil mask. In any case, he quickly gets to pawing away at Ansise, who, by all appearances, enjoys it lots.

Ansise is free in spreading word of her encounter with Pombero and is believed by no one. Leandro charmingly blames her belief in the creature on her immutable savagery, seeing as she is an indigenous woman whom Leandro married by arrangement with her tribe’s chieftain. Gradually it starts to appear that the ticking of Ansise’s biological clock, coupled with the roiling of her native blood, has driven her to madness. Indeed, the amount of visual noise (lots of abrupt flash forwards and flash forwards, bizarre superimpositions) that Bo employs toward depicting her mental disintegration raises the question of whether Embrujada was intended by him as his nudity-filled answer to Polanski’s Repulsion. Whatever the case, it could certainly count as a cut rate spiritual cousin to the current wave of maternal horror films lead by movies like The Babadook and Goodnight Mommy, though conspicuously bereft of the benefits those films had by virtue of having female directors. 

Embrujada was filmed in the Misiones province of Argentina and wisely gives visual prominence to the majestic Iguazu Falls, which serve as a resting place for our eyes between its scenes of grotesque human couplings. As for its other scenery, the film shows us a lot more than usual of Isabel Sarli, who is topless virtually throughout and often completely starkers. This is fine for dad, of course, but what does Embrujada offer for mom? Well, for her it has retrograde gender attitudes virulent enough to make even the most subservient hausfrau crackle with feminist rage. It’s a win-win, really.

Minik Cadi, aka Little Witch (Turkey, 1975)

My main takeaway from Minik Cadi is that its star, Cicek Dilligel, is the most horrifying child to have ever walked the Earth.

In the film, Dilligel plays "Cicek", a magical little girl who makes people's clothes disappear and then either deposits them in sexy situations or makes them want to have sex with each other. Yes, this is a Turkish sex comedy starring a child, so strap in.

Also starring in the film is Turkish beauty Meral Zeren, who plays Aysel, a timid housekeeper in love with her wealthy businessman employer, Murat (Bulent Kayabas). You'd have to flip a coin to determine whether Murat looked more like a pornstar or a pedophile, such is his mustache's sleazy ambiguity, but suffice it to say that he is a certain aspect of Minik Cadi personified--that being, the aspect of it that is not all about a horrifying little girl weirdly leering at everybody.

The version of Minik Cadi that I watched lacked English subtitles, and probably mercifully so. I might be able to describe it's plot to you had its characters not all been grotesque caricatures whose actions in no way conformed to actual human behavior. Suffice it to say that there is a corporate intrigue subplot that involves business associates of Murat's who are somehow trying to screw him over, in part by setting a honey trap for him with the aid of a stylish floozy played by sexpot Senar Seven.

There is also a kidnap plot involving Murat's young son, although the way it is staged makes everyone at first assume that the boy has drowned. We immediately know that something is afoot, though, because Murat's awful family, who live with him, present a unified front of mawkish lamentation when he is around and then party like it's 1999 whenever he leaves the room. It is at this point that Cicek makes her entrance, seemingly appearing from underneath the grieving Murat's car just as he is about to drive off a cliff.

Cicek's introduction involves a bone chilling sequence during which we watch Cicek Dilligel's face in closeup as it robotically files through a series of "expressions".  These expressions all fall into a category that would normally be considered cute, winsome, or adorable, and the problem is not that they are cloying--though they would be if they were not presented by Dilligel with all the cynicism of a 50 year old saloon girl. It is as if she is cruelly mocking anyone stupid enough to fall for her babydoll shtick. There is seriously no point at which she does not come off as venemously sarcastic.

From this point on, Minik Cadi plays out like a remake of Bewitched in which Samantha is a frightening child and Darren is played by John Holmes. As far as movie magic goes, it's certainly nothing we haven't seen before. Cicek casts her spells by wiggling her chin and the special effects are all of the type by which an actor vanishes simply by stepping out of frame when the camera is turned off. Cicek even has a hectoring mother witch who appears from time to time to set her straight, although she looks less like Agnes Moorehead than she does a senior resident of a Palm Springs trailer park.

Anyhoo, once introduced into the household, Cicek puts Murat's family through all the expected comic humilations while at the same time trying to make a love connection between Murat and Aysel.
She also magically strips Senar Seven down to her knickers and makes her materialize in a room full of horny men--which is hilarious, because they will probably rape her. On the other hand, Cicek saves Aysel from rape on two different occasions by transforming her into an animal--a dog in the first case, and a bear in the latter. Given the current sensitive climate, I am prompted to ask whether it is victim blaming to imply that Aysel would not have been raped had she not been human. Serves her right for walking around all bipedal like that.

Oh, and there is also a topless, big titted mermaid so that we can truly feel like we're watching a combination nudie cutie/children's film directed by the guy who made Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny.

Finally a pair of hit men--who I like to think of as audience surrogates--show up to assassinate Cicek. This admittedly provided some interest, though it only ended up with Cicek having a couple more foils to magically strip of their dignity. Then there's a scene where Cicek and her witch godmother wander around a rotting old house and cicek talks to a rat.

Minek Casi reached a peak of sorts for me near its conclusion, when Cicek transformed herself into a monkey wearing a Mr. Spock tee shirt. It was a nice try, but nothing Minek Casi could have done at that point would have convinced me that watching it had not been a soul wrecking waste of time. If anyone deserves Cicek Dilligel's cheerful derision, it is I.

The Virgin Goddess (Argentina/South Africa, 1974)

Helmed by Dirk De Villiers, a South African director of prolific output but little renown outside his home country, The Virgin Goddess is proof that Argentinian sex bomb Isabel Sarli was more than just a buxom puppet in the hands of her director paramour Armando Bo. Don’t assume, however, that Bo was not close at hand. He shares a co-production credit on the film and also appears in a supporting role. Furthermore, his son, Victor Bo, plays the male lead. Victor, I should mention, would go on to give Armando Bo a grandson, also named Armando Bo, who would grow up to share screenwriting credit on Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Oscar nominated film Birdman. And thus is a membrane-thin veneer of contemporary relevance laboriously attained.

Like so many jungle adventures before it, The Virgin Goddess begins in a modern city, that pinnacle achievement of man in all of his so called “civilization” (but are we really so civilized… ARE WE?). Here, a flinty adventurer—appropriately named Flint and played by director De Villiers himself—regales a table full of sophisticated gentlemen with the story of his latest adventure—in a manner so putatively captivating that, before he is done, the entirety of the patrons and wait staff of the bar they are in has gathered around their table.

Interestingly, Flint’s tale requires a preamble that starts in 1495. It seems a certain, beautiful, monster-titted noblewoman (Sarli) was making a treacherous passage by schooner when a violent storm lead to her being washed up in picturesque dishabille on the shore of some unknown African land (the film was shot in Kruger Park, one of South Africa’s largest game reserves). Because everything that gets left in the jungle—cigarette lighters, old copies of the New Yorker, Jell-O molds—ends up being elevated to the level of a deity, the natives waste no time in scooping Sarli up and making a goddess out of her. And it is at this point that we get the first of many, many travelogue style scenes of natives dancing around and chanting. This provides for lots of National Geographic style nudity, which takes the onus off Sarli, who apparently had some kind of Amy Yip clause in her contract.

Sarli is taken under the wing of the village witch doctor, Makulu (Jimmy Sabe) who acts as her Henry Higgins in terms of teaching her the ins and outs of being a rain goddess. Soon her fevered undulations bring rain. The crops thrive and the village prospers. Meanwhile, Makulu himself has become hoodoo’d by Sarli’s overflowing charms and demands that she become his bride. She refuses, and he puts a curse on her: she will live forever, as will he, as long as she remains a virgin. Makulu, it seems, is running the whole show here, and does so with an iron fist. When a young warrior named Gampu (Ken Gampu) attempts to assassinate him, he ends up being run out of the village and goes into hiding.

The Virgin Goddess is an odd film. Its dialogue is a mix of both spoken and dubbed English and Swahili (and to add to the linguistic chaos, the version I watched had Spanish subtitles). It also, especially in comparison to what Armando Bo—whose mania for Sarli’s attributes seemingly robbed him of all restraint—might have done with this kind of material, comes across as sort of… sedate. The pace is slow but measured, and there is an overall hush that reminds one of those old documentaries where the filmmakers spoke in whispers for fear of riling the natives or causing a rhino stampede. It doesn’t help that, whenever De Villiers cuts to a shot of the surrounding wildlife, the animals appear as if they are about to collapse from boredom.

Like her animal co-stars, the usually lusty Sarli also appears anesthetized, laying back complacently as the natives worship her and carry her around on a palanquin—admittedly, as she well might. It takes the intervention of civilized man, that notorious ruiner of everything, to finally bring her back to her old self. This comes in the form of an exploration party comprised of Flint, handsome devil Mark (Victor Bo), financier Hans (Armando Bo), and Eric (James Ryan), a mustached Chuck Negron look-alike who provides the gratuitous folk music.

The Virgin Goddess does not do a very good job of letting us in on when it has transitioned from the 15th century to the present day, so it comes as a bit of a surprise when Gampu, the outcast warrior previously seen only in flashback, steps forward to offer his services as guide to the explorers. From here, the standard retinue of jungle perils and treacheries commences, as naggingly familiar as the morning alarm clock. Eric reveals himself to be the coward of the group and is killed by a leopard while making an ill-advised run for it. Hans is the backstabbing turncoat, and is fatally bitten by vigilant cobras while trying to steal the tribe’s treasure for himself. Mark is handsome, and immediately falls for Sarli once he spies her fondling her own boobs in the local watering hole. This fateful encounter sets the stage for the cataclysmic fuck that will end the film in a hail of volcanic ash and toppling huts (spoiler).

The Virgin Goddess is not boring, even though it feels as though it should be boring. It is instead mesmerizing; mainly for the oddly somnolent approach it takes to material that, in other hands, would provide for a lot of bombast. Dirk De Villiers, it must be said, is no Armando Bo—and I am startled to find myself admitting that Bo’s over-the-top approach was missed here. Because of that, I will deem The Virgin Goddess a must-see only for Sarli completists, of which the desire-perverting tendencies of the internet guarantees there are some. Others, looking for an introduction to this unique star/director combo, would do best to check out the previously reviewed Fuego. Now that’s a picture, people!