Barebums & Voyeurs – The Steamy Films Of Tinto
Brass: Master Of Erotic Cinema (1983
– 2005/The Key/Miranda/All Ladies Do It/Monella/Transgressions/Do it!/Monamour/Umbrella Entertainment/PAL
Region Four/4/DVD Import Set)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C-
Films: B-
PLEASE NOTE: This DVD set can only be operated
on machines capable of playing back DVDs that can handle Region Four/4 PAL
format software and can be ordered from our friends at Umbrella Entertainment
at the website address provided at the end of the review.
Tinto
Brass is a survivor and one of the only filmmakers of erotic films to survive
long after the 1980s and home video killed the market for his kind of
product. The genre filmmaker moved to
erotica and by the time he took on Salon
Kitty (1976), which involved the erotic and Nazis, so he was the boldest
Italian director on the subject, though his films were not outright hardcore
graphic. This got him noticed by Bob
Guccione and as head of Penthouse, hired Brass to direct Caligula, which took four year to make and finally arrived in 1980.
Both films gave Brass a callous reputation and you can read about recent
releases of Caligula in both video formats at these links:
Blu-ray
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/8109/Caligula+%E2%80%93+The+Imperial
DVD
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6075/Caligula+%E2%80%93+The+Imperial
As we
await the arrival of Kitty on
Blu-ray, we were surprised a box set of his films (any of them) was being
issued anywhere, but here Umbrella Entertainment has compiled a collection of
seven films Brass made after these films and have given it the elaborate title Barebums & Voyeurs – The Steamy Films
Of Tinto Brass: Master Of Erotic Cinema.
The films are all more watchable than expected, keep the same soft,
diffused, warm 1970s style of cinematography that would make you think they
were all older than they are, involve voyeurism (a goofy person, usually a
dirty guy, shows up so the audience can laugh at him and we more comfortable
with watching) and his camera is so obsessed with female nudes, especially
everything below the waste.
The
politics of the films are always the same (women should always be nude and
always want sex, especially when they are pretty, young and sexy), while the
men are really secondary (though you do see male nudity and even erections),
but the stories (what there are of them) eventually seem secondary, but are
more than you would get in a XXX work.
Versus his more famous works, it turns out he is not as harsh or cold a
filmmaker as his reputation would have us believe, though narrative is hardly
his strongpoint.
The Key (1983/aka La chiave) casts
legitimate actor Frank Finlay (Lifeforce,
Shaft In Africa, Cromwell) as Nino, a man who is losing
his lust for life and… lust. As a
result, his wife Teresa (Stefania Sandrelli) is having an affair with another
man (Franco Branciarolli), but Nino is reading her diaries and things are about
to shake up.
Miranda (1985) stars Serena Grandi as the
title character, a landlady trying to find a husband and makes auditions
popular in this watchable comedy made sillier by the variety of men she lands
up with.
All Ladies Do It (1992/aka Cosi fan tutte) has married woman Diana (Claudia Koll) happy with
her marriage to Paolo (Paolo Lanza), but she still wants to try things with
other men and the results (like the film) are mixed.
Monella (1998/aka Frivolous Lola) has Lola (Anna Ammirati) and her fiancée/baker
Masetto (Mario Parodi) dealing with the oppression of 1950s Italy, but while he
wants to wait until they get married to have sex, she is not waiting and finds
other men, including her mother’s new lover André (Patrick Mower of the British
spy series Callan).
Transgressions (2000) is easily the best of the
films here, with the very sexy Carla (Yuliya Mayarchuk) trying to find an
apartment in London for her boyfriend, but finding all kinds of other men who
are more interested in her, plus a few women.
Brass manages to bring his 1970s style into the modern time without
loosing any of its classical sense or look, which is not easy to do: he throws
away his usual pretenses.
Do it! (2003/aka Fallo) is an anthology film with six stories that brings back some
of his past actors and is a nice change of pace from trying to do a whole
non-stop feature. The results may be
mixed, but it is at least ambitious for this kind of material.
Monamour (2005) concludes the set with
Parodi back as a married publisher whose wife Marta (Anna Jimskaya) is (again?)
unhappy with their marriage, so she gets together with Leon (Riccardo Marino)
while he is at a book fair and starts to write down everything she does. At 72 years old, Brass somehow has not lost
his sense of erotic passion by the time this film was released and you would
think a much younger man was directing all of these, but it is him. No, he is not a great director and not even an
Auteur, but he found a style and stuck with it and this set proves there is
another side to him than his two big hit films.
Now you can see for yourself.
The anamorphically
enhanced 1.78 X 1 image in all cases was shot on 35mm color film, usually Kodak,
but Fuji was
used as well later. The print quality
can show its age, but color and the style come through enough in each case that
they are all about on par with each other, with detail slightly improving as
they go along. Restoration is needed if these
films will join Caligula and Salon Kitty on Blu-ray down the
line. Dolby Digital English dub 2.0 is
the sound mix on all the films, with the first three monophonic, Lola in stereo via its advanced analog
Dolby SR (Spectral Recording) theatrical release and the last three digital
sound releases. Too bad the last four
are no 5.1 or the like. Ennio Morricone
actually scored The Key, Riz
Ortolani scored Miranda and Pino
Donaggio scored Monella and Transgressions. Worst of all, the original Italian dialogue soundtracks
are missing, making too much of this unintentionally goofy.
Besides a
provocatively illustrated, high quality box, the only extras are trailers for
all the films before a given film begins on any of the DVDs includes.
As noted
above, you can order this PAL DVD import set exclusively from Umbrella at:
http://www.umbrellaent.com.au/
-
Nicholas Sheffo
