Appassionata

APPASSIONATA is the story of a middle aged dentist named Emilio (Gabriele Ferzetti) facing crippling ennui while dealing with mentally ill wife Elisa (Valentina Cortese), demanding "daddy's little girl" daughter Eugenia (Ornella Muti) and a sexually aggressive schoolgirl named Nicola (Eleonora Giorgi). The title, with its clear reference to classical music, ties in to the wife's passion for playing the piano.

There are moments when the film plays like a sex fantasy for older men attracted to nubile young women, but the fact that these sequences are interspersed with jarring scenes with an incest subtext make this film an often profoundly unsettling experience.

To be fair, Italian films of this period were hardly strangers to hyper-sexed characters of either gender, but the whole notion that the not particularly interesting Emilio would be the target of this kind of unrestrained lust is a bit hard to take.

The rest of the film centres on Emilio's affair with the schoolgirl and his grotesquely inappropriate relationship with his own daughter and twisted interactions with his wife.

APPASSIONATA messes with you mentally. Men expecting some good old fashioned titillation will be creeped out at the most surprising times, and the more high minded looking for deep social commentary will be slightly appalled when the film hoes for the low road.

The film is recommended for aficionados of Italian cinema of the 1970s. I would suggest that this film holds most interest to those with an arthouse bent. The exploitation elements are most certainly there, but they are used in such a disturbing way that I could never recommend this film as any kind of a romp.