Review of Sixteen

Sixteen (1973)
Some more Lolita all'italia
19 August 2008
A girl (Ely Galeani),who recently turned sixteen but is still a virgin, has issues with both of her divorced parents, but especially her father. She decides to lose her virginity to the handsome boyfriend (Anthony Steffens) of her beautiful mother (Eva Czemerys). This is the basic plot of a number of Italian and European films of this era like "Casa de Palomas" (with Ornella and Lucia Bose) and "La Seduzione" (with Jenny Tamburi and Lisa Gastoni). The inspiration for all these was no doubt Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel "Lolita". Of course, the sexy, then-twentysomething Ely Galeani is not too believable as a sixteen-year-old girl, and the equally sexy, thirtysomething Eva Czemerys is definitely not believable as her mother. (So if you really want to see a movie like this with an actual underage girl and a frumpy, more middle-aged woman, you should probably look elsewhere). A film like this would never get made in America these days, but really there's nothing wrong with this kind mother-daughter fantasy--just as long as it STAYS a fantasy.

That's not to imply that this is one of those completely ridiculous porn scenarios either. Aside from the age of the two leading actresses, it's generally pretty believable. The acting is not quite as good as "Casa de Palomas" or "La Seduzione", but it's pretty decent. And the direction is definitely adequate. Galeani and Czemerys both have a plethora of impressive nude scenes (it sure beats "The Gilmore Girls"!), but the movie stops well short of even softcore porn (although just for the record, Galeani would later become somewhat of a softcore porn star a couple years later, appearing in several of the Joe D'Amato/Laura Gemser "Black Emanuelle" films).

This film, unfortunately, is not available in English, but it's worth checking out if you understand Italian at all.
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