"Can you feel the tingle of excitement, Miss Purity?" (Four Times That Night (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Four Times That Night (DVD)
Date:	18/05/09 (60 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Funny, well shot, well acted

Disadvantages: The end is a bit disappointing

A review of the film only. A Region 1 DVD is available through amazon, but it's a rather outrageous price - you won't get it for less than £15. It's also included in a Region 1 Mario Bava boxset that will hopefully get a UK release eventually. Channel Four have been known to show this.

Made in 1972, this is Italian horror director Mario Bava's only foray into the sex comedy genre. Sex comedies bloomed pretty much everywhere in Europe in the 70s, presumably as a result of censorship easing up. But while British sex comedies are lumpen and cretinous, this film has immense charm and is actually funny.

A very famous Japanese film called Rashomon was a big hit in 1950. It told the story of a woman and her husband who were (apparently) raped and murdered, respectively, by a bandit. The film's big innovation (or gimmick) was that the story was told four times in the film, once from each of the protagonists' point of view, with a final 'true' version to round things off. The film is really about the differences between the versions of the story and what they reveal about the characters.

Where's this going, you ask? Well, this film is a remake of Rashomon. But instead of rape and murder and banditry it deals with sexual misadventure and voyeurism. A man, Gianni, meets a girl, Tina, in a park. That night they go out dancing. What happens from there on in depends on who you believe. Having to account for a torn dress, Tina tells her mother that Gianni is a brute who tried to rape her. Trying to explain his scratched face to his pals, Gianni tells them that Tina is a feral nymphomaniac who left him exhausted. Trying to impress the milkman, the doorman at Gianni's apartment block tells a ludicrous story of gay men and predatory lesbianism. And then a psychiatrist turns up out of the blue to tell us what really happened.

The great thing about Mario Bava's films is that they look amazing. This is no exception. The colours are unusually vibrant, and the way the film is shot manages to bring novelty to fairly ordinary scenes. And it has the added advantage that this is a sex comedy, and has to be at least moderately titillating - so we get plenty of shots of the hems of absurdly short skirts, and some agreeable flashes of naked breasts.

The set design is incredible, a brilliantly 70s version of luxury and sophistication. Gianni's lounge-lizard bachelor pad is amazing: inflatable furniture, cheesy abstract sculpture and a record player with flashing lights in the base. It's Abigail's Party turned up to infinity. The disco scenes are full of typically unenthusiastic dancing, but there's a hilarious, cheesy fetish club scene during the doorman's story with almost-nude women in cages and camp men being whipped.

The music is a lounge delight (it could hardly not be). Imagine a kind of mid-point between saucy orchestral Carry On incidental music and the funkier stuff you got in the likes of the Schulmädchen-Report movies.

Gianni is played pretty well by American actor Brett Halsey (also in Bava's ill-advised comedy spaghetti western Roy Colt And Winchester Jack). Tina is Daniela Giordano, who is extremely sexy. And the doorman is played by the film's producer, exploitation mogul Dick Randall. He's surprisingly good, having a real flair for sleazy comedy.

It's mildly sexy throughout, but apart from a few shots of the leading lady's boobs and some nudity in the fetish club scenes, it's not terribly explicit. We certainly don't see any sex, and I'd imagine this would get a 15 rating if released here. But although it isn't terribly sexy, fortunately it's funny enough to more than make up for it.

The humour is much more sophisticated than you'd expect, and I was surprised at how often it made me laugh out loud. Tina's story paints her as a paragon of outraged virtue, giving Gianni some hilarious macho dialogue ("I am a wild man with turbo hormones!"). He, meanwhile, presents himself as a shy, sensitive sort of chap overwhelmed by predatory nympho Tina ("the smell of blood turns me on!"). And the doorman amusingly recreates Gianni as a waspish queen bickering with his boyfriend while his lesbian friend puts the moves on Tina. The fetish club scenes are a perfect representation of an unimaginative voyeur's fantasies of how an imaginary, decadent upper crust might entertain itself, even down to the naïve tourist being seduced ("We no do such things in Switzerland!"). The way the stories bounce off one another is genuinely witty; I was expecting this to be a curio, the dregs of a boxset I'd pretty much exhausted, but Bava has a way of surprising you. I like this a lot.

It's very much of its time - the gay characters are more Are You Being Served than Queer As Folk. And you can't help but wince slightly when Gianni praises "the girlish splendour of [Tina's] childlike body" (by which he simply means that she has small breasts, but it's isn't something you'd want to say to a lady nowadays, I'll warrant. If someone wants to try the line on someone, let me know how it works out for you).

But this is a great little film, and apart from a slightly weak ending, is successful on its own terms. Worth a look if you stumble across it, and proof that the much-maligned sex comedy genre had something to offer in the right hands.

Summary: A great Italian sex comedy