Dumped onto DVD with little fanfare under the generic title SEX ADVICE, SESSO IN CONFESSIONALE (or "Sex in the Confessional" in more accurate English) is, rather than the mondo-style doc promised by its advertising, more a scabrous and very period-appropriate critique of the Catholic church's attitudes on sex. If anything, the structure of the film more resembles one of the German REPORT films, centered on short, supposedly true vignettes.
Structure is fairly loose, and mostly built around people seen confessing or seeking guidance in a Catholic church. In addition to providing absolution, the priests serve as confidantes and psychiatrists, too. Of course, there's the expected litany of schoolgirl-style "I was heavy petting, father - is it a sin?" questions, but several of the parishioners also seek guidance on whether they can use birth control or family planning. As expected, the priests' responses - now decades out-of-date - are uniformly cringe-inducing: it's maddening to watch one guy tell a parishioner who's having great, fulfilling sex with his wife that he needs to stop if he's unwilling to have more children. Generally, most of the supplicants seem like sane, well-meaning individuals who only have their lives complicated by a bunch of uptight moralists introducing pointless rules and inventing problems.
Not that the film would articulate its thesis quite like that, but it does ultimately seem to be what it boils down to. While the movie uses these confessions as bridges to quick, semi-salacious scenes of the subjects people are talking about, the heart of its argument is found in equally brief interviews with feminists, sociologists, sex researchers, and various men and women on the street. Almost uniformly, they rebuke the clergy's advice, insisting that in a modern society things like premarital sex and birth control are necessary for people to form healthy relationships and lead fulfilling lives. As such, the film provides an interesting snapshot of Italy during a time of great transition, as things like the pill and legalized erotica were ushering in an era of greater sexual permissiveness. Despite being marketed as an exploitation film, SESSO instead has a lot more in common with other social issue movies of the time than an Ernst Hoffbauer jiggle opus. It still feints in that direction, but clearly is thinking deeper, and a more somber tone to match.
Unfortunately, the film - at least in available versions - never fully achieves its ambitions. It's erratic in the extreme, hopping from confession to confession and enactment to enactment with little structure or rhythm, and interspersing its interviews rather arbitrarily. Perhaps there's a more integral Italian edit that makes better sense, or maybe it's just an artifact of the '70s and You Just Had to Be There, but the result is muddled and confusing, an interesting attempt at something different (and more substantial) that nevertheless fails to make a compelling or cohesive argument.
