Liza (1972) – AKA La Cagna

neither chases nor flatters her. Her fascination curdles into jealousy, and she deliberately exhausts Melampo in the sea until the animal drowns. Having removed her rival, she takes his place: wearing the collar, crawling on all fours, eating from a bowl, barking and offering Giorgio the unquestioning devotion he valued in the dog. What sounds like a grubby exploitation picture is actually played with chilly calm.

Marco Ferreri refuses to make the arrangement conventionally sexy or conventionally shocking; he watches these two damaged adults turn desire into a private ritual of possession, dependence and voluntary humiliation. Giorgio accepts the role of master, yet Liza’s submission is also her way of controlling him, because she is steadily stripping away everything that competes for his attention. Their island game is interrupted when Giorgio must return to Paris after a crisis involving the family he deserted. There, among servants, children, comfortable rooms and talkative friends, his supposedly heroic escape from society begins to look less like freedom than selfish withdrawal. Liza follows him, still loyal to her chosen “master,” and draws him back toward their private kingdom. Once they return, however, paradise becomes a trap: their boat disappears, food runs short, the weather turns, and the lovers who rejected civilization discover how quickly romance changes when hunger enters the bedroom. A battered wartime aircraft offers a possible way out, but Ferreri keeps the mood suspended between desperate adventure, cruel joke and existential surrender. The storytelling is deliberately loose, made of abrupt little scenes and symbolic gestures rather than tidy explanations. Some viewers will find it slow and maddening; others will be hooked by its bleak humour and the strange sadness beneath the kink. It is less a defence of male authority than a nasty adult fable about two people who mistake isolation for liberty and ownership for love.

This is pure early-1970s European disillusionment: wealthy holidaymakers, rejected domestic respectability, political doodles, sexual experimentation and the fading dream that one could simply walk—or swim—away from modern life. Most of it was shot on the islands of Lavezzi and Cavallo, with only a few sequences in Paris. The sun-bleached rocks, crystal water, lonely beaches and Giorgio’s odd stone shelter give it the look of an expensive Mediterranean holiday invaded by madness. The vibe is part Robinson Crusoe fantasy, part sour black comedy and part fever dream, with a pink-painted aeroplane sitting in the landscape like a toy left behind by a suicidal child.

Catherine Deneuve is outrageously beautiful here: cool blonde hair, fine features, long limbs and pristine clothes that seem hilariously unsuited to rocks, salt water and fish guts. She begins as a spoiled, elegant intruder and gradually lets that polished femininity become feral, needy and unnervingly devoted. Watching one of cinema’s most refined women crawl, lick, bark and wear a dog collar supplies the film’s real erotic voltage. Yet this is not graphic pornography, and Ferreri does not linger over sex or turn the master-and-pet arrangement into a glossy BDSM fantasy. The charge comes from Deneuve’s physical surrender, her imperious beauty rubbing against degrading behaviour, and the uneasy suspicion that Liza may be the one holding the leash after all.