Ornella Muti has always been an interesting actress. Like a lot of her Italian contemporaries--Eleanora Giorgi, Jenny Tamburi, Gloria Guida--she has been in a lot of "exploitative" roles and movies (in one movie of hers I saw, for instance, her character willingly loses her virginity to her own father), but unlike these other actresses she has also managed to turn in a lot of superb roles in more highbrow art films, and her career has thus lasted a lot longer. On the other hand, her courage in choosing film roles has also allowed her to endure a lot longer than a lot of American actresses who never want to risk doing anything that might be exploitative and as a result never do anything really interesting either. The director Damiano Damiani is the same way--he's done art films like this, on one hand, but some the most exploitative trash imaginable (like "Amityville Horror 2"), on the other, but his films are rarely less than interesting.
This movie based on true story is about a young Sicilian girl (Muti) who is raped by the son of a Mafia don who is trying to force her to marry him by taking her virginity, but she instead goes to the police, which is something women just didn't do at the time (and something only a few brave souls in Sicily ever did to the Mafia). Muti is really good, which isn't that surprising perhaps, but so is her future husband, Alessio Oranio, who plays the mafioso, and who I had always pegged as a talentless pretty-boy. It may seem hard to believe the androgenously handsome Oranio would have to rape anyone (although it seemed to be his specialty for some reason--he also raped Jane Birkin in "May Morning", a drugged Elke Summer in "Lisa and the Devil", and Femi Benussi, kind of, in "The Killer Must Kill Again."). It's made clear in this movie, however, that the abduction and rape is a matter of pride, not sex, after this beautiful but poor peasant girl spurns the wealthy and vain young man's proposal of marriage.
I don't want to give away too much more of the plot, but it is a well-directed and well-acted and ultimately very powerful film. It's not one of Muti's more exploitative roles (she was only fourteen at the time), but she had plenty of those too. Check this one out for sure.
