Les biches suédoises

Italian director Silvio Amadio is most famous for two superior giallo thrillers he did in the early 70's, "Amuck" and "Smile Before Death". After that he directed a number of potboiler melodramas and at least one sex comedy with Italian lolita Gloria Guida (only one of which--"So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious"--is currently available in English). This movie was made before all of those, but it shares some elements with his later work. Like all of his later movie it is certainly a "sexy" film (at least by late 60's standards).

After a fight with her male lover, a beautiful girl (Catherine Diamante) goes to stay with a friend (the also-beautiful Ewa Green) on her private island where "no men are allowed". The friend is aggressively bisexual (as beautiful women usually are in these movies) and they soon develop a lesbian relationship. Their idyll is spoiled, however, when the male lover shows up. But the friend has a high-powered rifle that she won't use on pesky seagulls, but she might use on pesky men. . .

There is real lack of drama in this film, as the other reviewers said, until the very end at which point the drama becomes VERY drawn out. The two actresses are pretty, but they are simply not as compelling as the ones Amadio worked with later like Barbara Bouchet, Rosalba Neri, or Jenny Tamburi (or even Gloria Guida) and they often tend to kind of fade in the scenery. But what nice scenery it is! I can't fault the cinematography or the cinematic style at all. Unlike the other reviewer, I found Catherine Diamante more appealing than Ewa Green because, while the latter looks like an arch-European fashion model, Diamante has a more of a girl-next-door quality (and she does the same running-through-the-woods-while-throwing-off-all-her-clothes scene Gloria Guida would later make more famous in "Quella Eta Malizia").

I still can't figure out, however, the Italian title which translates to something like "Island of the Swedes". Ewa Green could be Swedish, judging from her first name, but she doesn't LOOK very Swedish. The Italians had all kinds of weird ideas about the Swedes though (see the Italian "mondo" movie "Sweden-Heaven or Hell?" sometime). Maybe they thought of all Swedes as a bunch of sexually voracious, gun-toting, bisexual lesbians? . .

This passionate thriller handles with the traditional love triangle between Maurizio (Nino Segurini, Amuck alla ricerca del piacere), a fashionable architect, his girlfriend Manuela (Ewa Green) and her wealthy friend Eleonora (Catherine Diamant, Cinque Donne per l'assassino). Manuela jilts Maurizio after another of their arguments, and she takes refuge beside Eleonora, who dwells in an isolated island, so called of "the Swedes", in the Sardinian Maddalena archipelago.

Eleonora, after a last and failed attempt with her friend Franco (Wolfgang Hillinger, Diabolik), becomes to feel attracted by Manuela, and she decides to shelter her. A relationship full of tenderness and complicity develops between the two young women. Should they manage to shake off the grasp of patriarchy and pursue their nascent love affair, in a feminine closed circuit like in Portrait de la jeune fille en feu? They plan to leave together for a journey abroad, but Maurizio lands on the small island, well decided to reconquer his girlfriend. The tragic outcome of this slow burning thriller will burst for the very last quarter of an hour of the story. (Viewed in Italian 1h18 version.)

Manuela (Eva Green) is determined to leave her fiancée Maurizio (Nino Segurini) in the past after a quarrel and decides to go to the isolated island in the Mediterranean Sea where her friend Eleonora (Catherine Diamant) resides, L'isola delle svedesi.

Silvio Amadio is the director and one of the writers of the movie and is interested in depicting Manuela's escapade as idyllic as possible: the sun always bathing the beach and the beautiful vista of the Mediterranean. A setting that serves as a canvas for Manuela and Eleonora to portray their sexual desires in usual outings to the beach where they film one another in a friendly but also sensual way. Their often nakedness illustrates not only a search for the object of desire by the camera lens but also their vulnerability as to the flowering of previously unknown feelings towards each other. A relationship that is not a simple one since it morphs from friendship to one where sexual tension blooms, turning them slaves to what cannot be enacted in words of certainty.

Amadio's feature has an uneven pacing where at the beginning of the movie the expository sequences tend to be slower, which should not be equated to bad, and towards the end the pacing is rushed and lacks explanatory aspects that render L'isola delle svedesi one lacking in profundity. Something that was hinted at the beginning, where upon getting to the island one asks the other why it is called like that, and the response she gets is, "It's an old story that goes back years." The matter is never touched again, and we are left out like in the finale.

Scouring the late night Italian TV channels yields a couple of intriguing (if utterly obscure) titles every week and this is certainly one of them; what drew me to it, apart from the involvement of Amadio - later director of the notoriously sexy giallo AMUCK! (1972) - was also the film's lesbian theme which was quite novel at the time.

Anyway, the film deals with a heterosexual couple having the latest in a long series of arguments, with the girl (Catherine Diamant) leaving lock, stock and barrel to live on an island owned by her sexually ambiguous best friend (Ewa Green). The latter has one last, unsuccessful attempt at bedding the mainland stud before her companion arrives, whereupon they embark on frequent (and completely) naked outings to the beach. Unfortunately, their idyllic existence is occasionally disrupted by Diamant's fiancée and the aforementioned stud. Ultimately, Diamant gives in to her "normal" cravings until Green makes good use of a shotgun which had previously seen no active service but which is soon being fired away in all directions in an unexpected Zaroff-like manhunt...

The film features a lush score by Roberto Pregadio but, unfortunately, variations on the main theme are used practically all through the picture whether the music is attuned to the current sequence or not. Furthermore, the thing is almost half over (at least in the trimmed version I watched) before anything remotely interesting i.e. titillating happens but, as I mentioned earlier, the chase finale - complete with a twist ending - almost makes up for this deficiency. The girls, of course, are attractive - Green in particular who, however, has the lesser amount of nude scenes!