Il seme dell'uomo

I got led to this by "Godard Mon Amour," in which a divide between the dramatized Godard and Anne W. is heightened by her accepting the lead in this film after Ferrari agrees that she won't have to appear nude at all, let alone throughout. (Neither lead does, so either that was an invention of "Mon Amour," or Ferreri radically changed his concept before filming.) Anyway, it's an interesting, rather typical European arthouse experiment of the counterculture era. The leads are a modern Adam & Eve left alone in a well-supplied beach house after they survive a murky apocalyptic incident that apparently kills off most of mankind. (They seem to have survived by driving through a long tunnel when "it" hit.)

But this Eve doesn't want to re-populate the Earth by giving birth in such a bleak environment. The only thing that "happens" after the start is the eventual arrival of Annie Girardot as an older woman a little too eager to fill the sexuality/pregnancy gap with our virile young hero, and whose competitiveness towards the heroine leads toward the movie's one violent act.

"The Seed of Man," which I could only find in Italian without English subtitles (I understand some Italian, but this isn't a movie where the dialogue is terribly important), is typical of many Ferreri films: Striking in concept, middling in execution. It's lively enough considering that not much "happens," and the leads are agreeable, but there are too many scenes of them simply gamboling about, and the bemused, leisurely tenor isn't close enough to either satire or tragedy for the overall sociopolitical commentary to have any great impact. Still, it's a quirky movie from an always-interesting (at least in theory if not always practice) filmmaker, and if like me you get a kick out of such late 60s/early 70s projects that no one in their right mind would have funded at any other moment in time, "Seed" is certainly worth a look.