Cecilia

Cecilia (1982)

aka Sexual Aberrations of a Housewife

** (out of 4)

After being gang raped and then having sex with her husband, a woman (Vicky Adams) discovers that marital sex is a lot better when the relationship is open. This is an extremely rare film from Jess Franco but it's really a straight love story and not a sleazy effort. Franco treats the subject matter with full respect and tries his best to tell an honest story about marriage and the film remains interesting throughout, although not too much really goes on. Lina Romay has a small part as a sex teacher.

I won't beat around the bush, as it's better to make a clean breast of all fleshly matters, so I'm coming clean about my avid appreciation of the splendidly smutty 80s classic, Cecilia. I have long been fervidly fixated with maestro, Franco's monobrowed, micro-budgeted, magisterially befleshed, bountifully bushed, pink-centric 80s output. This revealing expose of premature female emancipation is a gaudy delight of onanistic overkill and penetratingly hole-sum entertainment! Sadly, some more pedantic, pudenda-pounding pundits are often too 'hardon' this greasy-palmed expose of a morally liberated middle-class mademoiselle. I found Franco's scintillatingly skin-sational 'Cecilia' to be enticingly endowed with one of the sweetest openings I have ever seen in any exotic 'lotion picture'!

Happily, Franco's luridly investigatory camera leaves little to the viewer's imagination, as what lofty flights of far-flung cinematic fancy could ever really grope to match the perfectly pulchritudinous presence of the enchanting, sinfully statuesque starlet Muriel Montossé? With his fabulously frothy femme-fest, recidivist flesh-addict, Franco couldn't be any more voluptuously vainglorious! 'Cecilia' remains seamily stimulating and pleasantly degrading at the same time, which is, quite frankly, far more entertainment than a nimble-wristed wretch such as I deserve.

Most everybody in Cecilia has a beautiful body but nobody seems to know how to use them to their own advantage or the audience's. The film is an exercise in erotic/dramatic filmmaker, however the film's eroticism is so limited and tame - by today's standards - and the exposition so uninteresting that one has all they can do to stay interested. Not to mention the horrendous English-dubbing to only further turn off an excited viewer.

The film follows a woman named Cecilia, a dashing housewife known for tempting men with her gorgeous figure and beautiful assets. One day, Cecilia is victim to a violent assault in the back seat of her chauffeur's car that will forever change the way she has sex. Cecilia turns into a swinger, having sex with numerous different men and partaking in various orgies around town. Her loving husband, while understands his wife's desires and, because of that, begins to embrace an omnisexual lifestyle much like his wife's. Cecilia becomes entangled in what seems to be a crippling case of sex addiction and excess.

Cecilia is played by Muriel Montossé in a role of adequate significance despite the film being named after her. Montossé is gorgeous and possesses a desirable figure, and yet she's given so little to do and say that the dramatic portion of the story fails because the film's protagonist has so little interesting qualities. Montossé does well during some of the sex scenes, some involving multiple different parties, and for that, deserves acclaim to a certain extent. But yet, she can't seem to overcome the limitations and the stunning lameness of the screenplay.

The sex scenes only have a fair amount of eroticism to them. Many of the scenes bear the kind of ordinariness and dismissive qualities one could find by channel-surfing Cinemax after around 11pm. Given the time period of 1983, the sex scenes definitely had a racy factor to them for the time period, but a surprising thirty-one years later they fail to drum up much excitement.

The most noteworthy sex scene is an interracial one between Anthony Foster, who is white, and Ana Paula, who is black. The scene is pretty mild, like the bulk of the sex scenes in Cecilia but has charm because of interracial sex being a taboo at the time. The most noteworthy element of the scene is that Paula accentuates admirable sexual energy throughout the entire scene, although, like most of the film, it gets bogged down by its own blandness.

The scenes that do hold justice are the scenes where the film takes a poetry-in-motion approach to use long takes and sporadically-employed zooms to capture the beauty of life plus the inclusion of naked people. One particular scene in the beginning has the incomparable ability to ease as it involves a naked Montossé softly swimming and soaking in a medium-sized pond filled with flowers and lilypads. The scene is only alleviated in the sound department by the sounds of the water splashing and the quiet sounds of the bugs chirping. Surprisingly this is the scene of the film, along with a later one that assumes much of the same naturalistic characteristics of letting the environment speak for itself. The other scene involves Montossé (yes, nude again) listlessly wandering on an open beach with nothing but the sounds of rushing water and faint wind blowing the background. These scenes eventually lead to others that take place in the middle of the woods or in an explicitly green forest.

Famed pornographic director Jesús Franco directs the film with a strong emphasis on Raymond Heil's attractive, nature cinematography, providing the film with a visual layer that will likely go unnoticed with the prominence of skin. There are so many good pornographic works, however, that even genre-enthusiasts may question wasting their time with Cecilia. It's like a classy drinker of the finest tequilas popping into a liquor store for a bottle of Zarco. Why lower standards?

Starring: Muriel Montossé, Anthony Foster, and Ana Paula. Directed by: Jesús Franco.

It is know that Jesus Franco did his fair share of total waste of time films. By that i mean films that dont have no reedeming qualities whatsoever. He also did a lot of very good ones and i like him a lot but Cecilia is not one of the good ones. This film is basically Emanuelle. That by itself is a huge disapointment for Jesus Franco enthusiasts because Emanuelle sucks really bad. But not only that this film is Emanuelle WITHOUT Sylvia Kristel and no one as interesting or charismatic to fill the gap. Lina Romay has a role in it but its quite insignificant. She has something like 5 minutes of screen time in total and even if she had more i doubt that it would be enough to make this one worthwile. The plot is very uniteresting, the soundtrack is very stock, the lead actress has no charisma, the locations are not particularly interesting either, some scenes go on forever (like the one where we see cecilia going back and forth horseback riding on the beach. And also it is way too long for its own good. Maybe if it was something close to 80 minutes it would be a little more tolerable but it isnt and it aint.