All Ladies Do It – 1992

Italian erotic cinema's juiciest lady, Claudia Koll, Uninhibited, Edible, Handful. Tinto Brass at his most playful.

A faithful husband, a wife with an itch for adventure, and Tinto Brass behind the camera—marriage counselling was never going to stay fully dressed.

Diana is a beautiful young Roman wife who genuinely loves Paolo but has begun to find their comfortable marriage rather too comfortable. She spices up their bedroom by describing flirtations with other men, and Paolo enjoys these stories because he assumes they are fantasies. Trouble arrives at a risqué literary party, where the elegant, predatory Alphonse takes a very hands-on interest in her and nearly seduces her before Paolo interrupts. The encounter awakens something Diana can no longer giggle away. Working in a lingerie shop hardly cools her blood, especially when her uninhibited colleague Antonietta cheerfully recommends adultery as harmless recreation. A family inheritance then sends Diana to Venice alone, giving her both distance from her husband and another opportunity to meet Alphonse. This time she lets fantasy become...

fact. Back home, she recounts the adventure as part of the couple’s usual erotic storytelling, but physical evidence forces Paolo to understand that his wife is no longer merely teasing him. His excitement turns into wounded jealousy, and Diana’s breezy excuses only deepen the rupture. Cast out of the marital nest, she plunges further into experimentation, eventually landing at a wild outdoor rave where drink, drugs, naked bodies and indiscriminate sex turn liberation into something frantic and strangely lonely. That hint of sadness beneath the bouncing flesh is what gives the film more bite than its dirty-postcard surface suggests. Brass shoots everything with his familiar peeping-Tom enthusiasm—keyholes, mirrors, legs, stockings and female bottoms dominate the frame—yet he is also poking at a serious contradiction: can erotic freedom exist inside marriage when one partner wants the thrill but expects the other to absorb the pain? Diana calls it honesty, Paolo experiences it as betrayal, and the film refuses to pretend those are the same thing. It is broad, silly and often shameless, but beneath Pino Donaggio’s jaunty music and the bedroom farce lies a rather bruised story about two people discovering that desire is easy, while trust is expensive.

This is unmistakably early-1990s Italy: loud fashions, lingerie-shop glamour, throbbing disco music and a pre-internet appetite for sexual provocation. Its on-screen world moves between busy Rome and a Venice of inherited attics, shadowy passages and decadent artists’ rooms, with parts of the Venetian setting carrying a deliberately artificial, studio-fashioned look. The vibe is sunny Mediterranean erotica gradually developing a melancholy hangover—more champagne farce than solemn drama, although the laughter becomes less carefree as Diana’s adventures begin costing her something real.

Claudia Koll carries the picture with an infectious, almost childlike cheekiness that can be charming one moment and maddening the next. Brass adores her voluptuous figure, especially her magnificent backside, and photographs her with the enthusiasm of a man who has never understood why a camera should look anywhere else. Koll is frequently nude, often posed in stockings or revealing lingerie, and completely game for Diana’s shameless curiosity. Ornella Marcucci and Isabella Deiana add their own saucy energy, but this is unquestionably Koll’s show. The uncut version contains extensive full-frontal nudity, erect male members, masturbation, explicit porn playing within a scene, staged anal sex and simulated intercourse filmed close enough to push well beyond ordinary softcore, though it stops short of performers actually having sex for the camera.

One of Tinto Brass’s Most Memorable works, with the Gorgeous French Goddess Claudia Koll.

After five years of marriage, Diana discovers the joys of adultery, claiming that she can save her failing relationship through betrayal.