A difficult film to write about because it is so much one of a kind and that it is so much of a certain time and because it has become more problematic recently to be free to separate the notions of sexual fantasy and desire from abuse. Director Pasquale Festa Campanile had a modest film career tending to specialise in Italian sex comedies and is more renowned for his screenwriting, particularly for his work in the early 60s. He did direct the notorious Hitch-Hike (1977) ,however, with Franco Nero and Corinne Cleary and the little seen Check to the Queen (1969) one of my personal faves that has something of the look and certainly shares the BDSM element with the film under discussion. Here a young (although already veteran of some dozen films) Catherine Spaak stars to devastating affect, looking ravishing throughout. But then everything looks pretty good, the set and costume designs are fantastic and there is barely a shot that does not make you gasp and the beauty or audacity. The music of Armando Trovajoli also helps enormously with its constant twinkling delights and sexy sounds. Our young widow peers into the secret past of her late husband and the more strange and awful and bad and taboo his apparent exploits appear the more she is intrigued to have a go herself. The extent to which she indulges and is seen to enjoy those elements of sex and violence is viewed as problematic today but in the late sixties was seen by many as all part of life's rich experience just waiting to be explored. Leaving the sexual politics aside this can be seen as a wondrous garden of delights, clearly influenced by the previous year's masterpiece from Luis Bunuel, and somehow managing to treat the subject more seriously, in that it is proffered as a solution for our heroine but at the same time more frivolously in the way there is all the time a more candy floss look and feel to the proceedings. Good fun for the broadminded though.
