Gabriella, Gabriella

It's hard to know where to begin with GABRIELLA, GABRIELLA, a 1970-lensed soft-X feature repurposed to pad the running time of Arthur Marks' CLASS OF '74. The narrative is borderline incomprehensible and the plot non-existent, yet the film is so of-its-time bizarre that it takes on a strangely beguiling charm.

Poor Gabriella lives at home with her bickering parents, who are first introduced in a sex scene bafflingly intercut with footage of their nude daughter swimming (the incestuous overtones at hopefully accidental). After a shrill fight with the wife, dad packs up and heads out to cruise the Sunset Strip, eventually picking up a girl at a bar and leading her to a hotel with promises to help her make it in the music biz.

Just as the viewer begins to wonder why the film is called GABRIELLA, GABRIELLA and not GRUMPY MIDDLE-AGED SLEAZEBALL, it cuts back to the house, where Gabriella's mother seduces the middle-aged poolboy in a rushed and ineffective scene. Then, finally (only a half hour in), we join Gabriella and her boyfriend, Stephan, who are serving as subjects for a documentary on teenage sexual liberation being made by a couple of friendly, swinging neighbors.

The quartet's first stop is Los Angeles' real-life Eros Institute, where a Scandinavian woman introduces two young performers who provide a graphic demonstration of sexual intimacy. A bickering couple up front echoes Gabriella's parents, and our protagonists split before the inevitable orgy. Back at the couple's house, Gabriella and Stephan sit gamely by as the pair interviews Xavier (Ron Lawrence), a young gay man who expounds on life, love, and masturbation in a rambling yet oddly compelling monologue.

Things really run off the rails the next day, when Gabriella and Stephan join the couple at some kind of nebulously-defined downtown institute, which they can only reach by fighting their way through roving packs of hippies and child militants (I swear I'm not making this up). Whatever or wherever this place is supposed to be is unclear - the couple enters and steps from a vestibule into a wooded area that couldn't possibly fit inside a loft. As Gabriella and Stephan begin to explore each other, the vying factions in the street start waging war, with G&S's sexual energy eventually permeating the walls of the institute and bringing peace and harmony to the populace. The film ends with the entire cast dancing naked by a backyard pool, credits rolling as the viewer attempts to mop his brains off the floor.

Judged by any traditional rubric, GABRIELLA, GABRIELLA is an appalling failure. Its story is non-existent and the action lurches haphazardly through a daisy chain of random characters and situations. The tone careens wildly from scene to scene, with the film starting out like a traditional T&A flick before morphing into some kind of bizarre student art film, with a lengthy detour into white coater territory along the way. The point seems to be that the Peace & Love Generation's sexual freedom will atone for the sins of its elders, which I guess explains why Gabriella's father is such an insufferable, lecherous dick, but the film circles its point so lazily it resembles a dog trying to find a place to sit. Several sequences of frontal nudity from Gabriella's chubby, hirsute father don't improve matters, though they are at least counterbalanced by plentiful full-frontal from the rest of the young and attractive cast. (Much was definitely cut during the film's transformation into the R-rated CLASS OF '74.)

All this said, I was strangely charmed by GABRIELLA. It's an unequivocal mess, somehow even less comprehensible than the feature its footage would eventually be shoehorned into, yet it commits so fully to its strange countercultural project that you can't help but respect its sincerity. At no time on earth but a sliver of the 1970s could this film have been made, and for all its heavy-handedness and incompetence, it's a fascinatingly pure record of the muddled ethos of the era. CLASS OF '74 may be the better film technically, but this is still the version I'd recommend.