Our Lady of Lust

Director-producer Sergio Bergonzelli (BLOOD DELIRIUM, IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH) is a sort of "loose cannon" of the Italian erotic film industry. Some critics have complained that his movies are weak and incoherent. I believe the latter is sometimes true, but Bergonzelli rarely treads lightly on his subject matter. For instance, CRISTIANA THE DEVIL NUN makes a very strong statement about who should and should not take the vows in the Catholic church.

Cristiana (Magda Konopka) is a free spirit who, with her boyfriend, Luca, shocks the passengers on a commercial airplane by making love in their seats. A nun looks on. A raging thunderstorm threatens to destroy the plane in midair. Cristiana asks God to save them all, and in return she promises to become a nun. Guess what happens?

At the convent, Cristiana is anything but subdued and submissive to God. Raphael, a wild-eyed painter of religious art, asks her to sit for him. "You have an inner heat," he declares. But she says she burns "only for Jesus."

Cristiana dreams of kaleidoscopic sin, such as making love to Luca and the painter. She works her way through the nunnery, content to merrily screw as she goes. Eventually, Luca infiltrates the convent bell tower, and he and Cristiana continue with the same activities that shocked the airplane passengers.

Another nun, Leonora, discovers Luca's hiding place, and the two of them "go down the primrose path to damnation." In an amusingly sleazy moment, Cristiana discovers them together, and a bumbling, apologetic Luca chases Cristiana out of the convent wearing only a black jockstrap, while several wide-eyed nuns look on in horror.

Cristiana runs home to her drunken prostitute mother, who tells her daughter, "You're going to learn everything mom did." A sexually and ideologically liberated Cristiana insists, "I want to start living." She strips for partygoers at a festive bacchanal, and becomes the mistress of a sleazy money launderer named The Professor. Once again, she sits for Raphael, this time for a painting he calls "The Possessed."

The Professor manipulates Cristiana into joining orgies for the benefit of his voyeur clients, and convinces her to go back to the convent to steal a valuable crown from a statue of the Virgin Mary. The caper goes bad and Cristiana attempts to flee the scene unnoticed. You could say her descent into madness does not end well.

Far from being a sober meditation on the verities of sin and salvation, this movie is a riotous camp fest. Featuring a burning toy airplane in the opening sex-and-conversion scene, plus a certain CLOCKWORK ORANGE ambience (e.g., ladies in blue wigs), it's a hands-down sleaze fest of the first order.

Holding back, stifling an impulse. The protagonist embodies the conflict between religious morality and sexual urges, even transforming the convent into a setting of forbidden desire and carnal temptation. The intent is to show religion not as a path to salvation, but as a repressive instrument, which nevertheless fails to quell the protagonist's (self-destructive) desire for freedom. In this, the film is ambiguous, demonstrating that the difference between possession and transgression is subtle, but that the direction is common, and it nevertheless leads to a tragic epilogue. Unfortunately, this representation of the female body as the seat of sin and temptation falls within the clichés of erotic genre cinema, where women are both victim and culprit.

The young and uninhibited Cristiana (Toti Achilli), returning from a vacation with her boyfriend Luca (Gerardo Rossi), promises to donate her soul to God by becoming a nun, while nearly crashing her plane. Against the advice of her mother (Eva Czemerys), an upper-class prostitute, she begins her novitiate in a convent, where the monotony of monastic life is bearable only thanks to the transgressive attention of Sister Eleonora (Magda Konopka). The Mother Superior commissions the painter Massimo Raggi (Vassili Karis) to fresco a Madonna, for which Cristiana is chosen as the model.

Sergio Bergonzelli's direction (4.0) fails to break free from genre clichés, overdoing optical effects to emphasize the protagonist's mystical moments; the screenplay (4.5) by the same director focuses solely on morbid and provocative scenes, neglecting to create true narrative tension; from a technical standpoint (4.0), Antonio Maccoppi's cinematography attempts to play on the alternation of austerity and transgression, failing to achieve this, while the soundtrack is extremely typical, with music that oscillates between sacred tones and more sensual rhythms; the cast (4.0) is depressing in its inability to be real and believable.

Best moments: the first sequences on the plane, where the director, actors, and special effects department show what they're made of. A must-see for fans of erotic and scandalous films, although the cinematic landscape certainly offers much better.

This movie, while marketed under the relatively innocuous English title "Loves of the Nympho", may be the most insane of the many insane offerings of Italian director Sergio Bergonzelli, who was already making the kind irredeemable sleaze in the early 70's that his fellow countrymen like Joe D'Amato, Andreas Bianchi, and Bruno Mattei would be churning out by the end of the decade. This seems to be a kind of sequel to Bergonzelli's earlier "Cristiana, Student of Scandal" (at least, if the title character hadn't died at the end of that)with Toti Achilli taking over the role Malissa Longo originally played as a college-age, ridiculously promiscuous, micro mini-skirted minx.

When the film opens "Cristiana" is having sex on airplane, but not in the bathroom like a normal person--no, she's doing it right in coach(!) while her hedonistic friends cheer her on and the other passengers, including a couple nuns, look on embarrassed. But then the plane almost goes down in a rainstorm (in some hilarious model-airplane-in-a-bathroom-shower footage), and she repents her sinful ways to one of the nuns and promises to join a convent. When they end up surviving, she follows through on her promise, even though her society mother (Eva Czemerys) and her friends are dead-set against it. But, of course, if you've ever seen an Italian "nunsploitation" movie, you know there's no better place for a crazed nympho to be! Once in the convent she immediately has a lesbian affair with an older nun (Magda Konopfka). A male painter corners her in a bell tower and really rings HER bell. She then sneaks her boyfriend into the nunnery. I won't reveal the rest, but since this is a Sergio Bergonzelli film, you know it's going to swing wildly from screwball comedy to tragedy and back again.

This was not the first "naughty nun" movie. There had been several versions of the classic story "The Nuns of La Monza" (and the British film "Black Narcissus" could also be thrown in here). And these kind of stories really go back in literature to Bocaccio's "The Decameron". But what Bergonzelli did here was REALLY ladle on the sleaze (including a trippy fantasy sequence where Cristiana has sex with a psychedelic painted Jesus!). He really puts the "ploitation" in "nunsploitation". Anyway, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, I wouldn't recommend this kind of unrepentantly sleazy, morally degenerate, sacrilegious trash to anyone, but it's always worked for me.