Desesperadas de Amor

Manuela (Eva Green) is determined to leave her fiancée Maurizio (Nino Segurini) in the past after a quarrel and decides to go to the isolated island in the Mediterranean Sea where her friend Eleonora (Catherine Diamant) resides, L'isola delle svedesi.

Silvio Amadio is the director and one of the writers of the movie and is interested in depicting Manuela's escapade as idyllic as possible: the sun always bathing the beach and the beautiful vista of the Mediterranean. A setting that serves as a canvas for Manuela and Eleonora to portray their sexual desires in usual outings to the beach where they film one another in a friendly but also sensual way. Their often nakedness illustrates not only a search for the object of desire by the camera lens but also their vulnerability as to the flowering of previously unknown feelings towards each other. A relationship that is not a simple one since it morphs from friendship to one where sexual tension blooms, turning them slaves to what cannot be enacted in words of certainty.

Amadio's feature has an uneven pacing where at the beginning of the movie the expository sequences tend to be slower, which should not be equated to bad, and towards the end the pacing is rushed and lacks explanatory aspects that render L'isola delle svedesi one lacking in profundity. Something that was hinted at the beginning, where upon getting to the island one asks the other why it is called like that, and the response she gets is, "It's an old story that goes back years." The matter is never touched again, and we are left out like in the finale.