Appassionata (1974)

then visits Emilio’s surgery, where a supposedly dazed reaction to dental anaesthetic becomes an audacious seduction. Emilio initially looks like a man caught in someone else’s game, but vanity and appetite soon take over. What begins as a furtive encounter develops into an affair, and his infatuation with Nicola makes the household even more poisonous. Eugenia watches, competes and begins imagining herself in her friend’s place, while Elisa senses that her marriage is disintegrating without fully understanding the triangle tightening around her. After Eugenia makes her own intentions unmistakable, Elisa’s fragile state collapses into another crisis and Emilio starts talking about escape, only to discover that Nicola may understand his weakness better than he does. Calderone keeps pushing the drama towards a boundary nobody sensible wants crossed, using the erotic scenes less as romantic release than as symptoms of selfishness, loneliness and emotional decay. The script can be blunt and occasionally absurd, but Armando Nannuzzi’s shadowy interiors, Piero Piccioni’s melancholy lounge-jazz score and Valentina Cortese’s raw, wounded performance give the film more unease than its scandal-sheet premise promises. It is trashy, certainly, yet not carefree trash: beneath the nudity lies a bleak picture of a man enjoying female attention while refusing to see the damage accumulating around him.

This is pure mid-1970s Italian bourgeois decadence, made when respectable homes, adolescent rebellion, psychoanalytic taboos and relaxed censorship were being mixed into one provocative cinematic cocktail. Shot around Rome—including Viale Regina Elena, Via della Navicella and the Convent of Saints John and Paul—the film moves between polished apartments, school streets and Emilio’s memorably misused dental surgery. The vibe is affluent but airless: dark rooms, strained silences, cigarette-smoke sophistication and Beethoven competing with Piccioni’s seductive saxophones. Rome is present, but this is mainly an indoor world where everybody is trapped with everybody else.

Eleonora Giorgi supplies the film’s brazen sexual spark as Nicola, playing her with a teasing smile, cool confidence and the unnerving composure of someone testing how easily an older man can be handled. Ornella Muti is softer, sulkier and strikingly beautiful as Eugenia, turning jealousy into a mixture of wounded innocence and dangerous intent. Both performers were young adults, despite playing school-age characters, and Calderone photographs their beauty with unapologetic voyeurism. Depending on the version, the film contains extended topless and full-frontal nudity, with Giorgi receiving the more overtly sexual material and Muti’s exposure carrying the greater shock value. It is softcore rather than hardcore—no unsimulated sex—but for 1974 it was bold, intimate and deliberately scandalous.