Frivolous Lola (1998)

three soldiers, flashes more than good manners permit and sparks a brawl. After the couple storm apart, a stranger offers Lola a ride that becomes genuinely dangerous, while Masetto runs to a prostitute in a spiteful attempt to prove his manhood. Lola also toys with André, her mother’s worldly lover and possible father, creating an uneasy undercurrent beneath the comedy. When direct temptation keeps failing, she changes tactics and uses Masetto’s jealousy against him, pushing their courtship toward the reckoning both of them have been provoking. This is hardly a subtle relationship drama, and the script can feel like a clothesline on which Brass hangs one voyeuristic gag after another. Yet the film’s cheerful shamelessness is difficult to resist. Brass shoots through windows, furniture, skirts and keyhole-like gaps, making the camera another dirty-minded villager forever trying to catch a glimpse. The story is less interested in morality than hypocrisy: Masetto may preach chastity, but Lola is the more honest of the two because she admits exactly what she wants. Beneath the nudity and slapstick lies a simple point about desire inside a couple—denied passion turns sour, while jealousy often reveals more than pious speeches about honour. The result is bright, silly, occasionally sleazy and surprisingly good-natured, closer to a bawdy screwball comedy than a solemn erotic drama. Its best moments—the bakery teasing, the café dance and Lola’s rain-soaked misadventure—have a playful visual energy that keeps the thin plot bouncing along.

The setting is northern Italy around the late 1950s and early 1960s, when rock ’n’ roll, the economic boom and loosening sexual attitudes were beginning to disturb the old provincial order. Filmed around Pomponesco and Dosolo in the Po Valley, it revels in village streets, riverside countryside, bicycles, bread ovens, summer colours and communal feasts. The vibe is an intentionally exaggerated memory of postwar Italy: sunny, hungry, nosy and permanently one gust of wind away from indecency.

Anna Ammirati carries the picture with a mischievous grin, fearless comic timing and the kind of lush, natural femininity Brass’s camera plainly adores. Lola is not played as a tortured temptress but as a warm, curvy, impatient young woman delighted by her own body and baffled by a fiancé too stubborn to enjoy it. Ammirati spends much of the film nude or barely dressed, with abundant views of her breasts, bottom and pubic hair, plus intimate full-frontal close-ups that push the film well beyond ordinary soft-focus erotica. The sex is simulated, but the nudity is explicit, prolonged and deliberately voyeuristic. Serena Grandi adds mature, voluptuous glamour as Lola’s mother, though this is Ammirati’s show from first cheeky bicycle ride to last knowing smile.

A Tinto Brass Film set in the 1950s Italian countryside, the film tells the story of a young couple Lola and Masetto, whose views on premarital sex differ drastically, where Lola tests her fiancé’s love and passion by trying to break his commitment to premarital chastity.