A very bourgeois French woman is stuck in a German city after missing a connecting flight. She stays at an old hotel she stayed at years earlier, unaware that it has fallen on hard times and is full of "undesirables". Through a crack in the adjoining door she becomes aware of a Henry Miller-quoting student radical who is hiding out there (who you would think would know there was a hole in his door, but then he seems a few cards short of a full deck). The woman becomes fascinated with the man and his junkie girlfriend (a kind of Marlene Deitrich impersonator). She follows them around and gets caught in a police raid at a nightclub with the girlfriend. Eventually, she and the man become much more, uh, intimately involved.
This movie has some elements of a low-rent version of "The Night Porter", but it's actually more like an Italian "terror film" where a bourgeois character is held captive by a criminal and develops a case of sexual Stockholm syndrome--except here the woman really develops Stockholm syndrome BEFORE they even meet. Carlo Lizzani is an interesting Italian director who has directed fairly realistic films like the neo-realist social expose "The Prostitution Racket" (which, since it was made in the sleazy '70's, may be the only neo-realist social drama to include hardcore sex inserts). But he also directed the highly theatrical giallo thriller "The House with Yellow Carpet", one of the most stylized and self-consciously artificial of a generally stylized and self-consciously artificial genre. His directing is interesting here such as when he films the first sex scene between the protagonists through the crack in the door from the perspective of the other (empty) room and then does the opposite in the interesting final scene--creating a kind of metaphoric distance the characters' two "worlds".
French beauty Corrine Clery ("The Story of O", "Moonraker") has the distinction of being the former "Bond" girl with the most sexually explicit career (at least, until one the latter-day Bond girls decides to dive into hardcore porn). She is saddled with an unflattering hair-do here, but she has the same great body. Her character does all kinds of really bizarre things, like checking out at one point, but then going back to the room to masturbate butt-naked on the floor. (I'm not sure exactly what her character's motivation is in this scene, but then again, who cares?). The last part of this movie is pretty much one sex scene after another, which is probably for the best because ALL the characters are saddled with terrible and truly risible English dialogue (i.e."there's a rat that hides in the darkness of my heart"). But you cannot (always) blame this on the original filmmakers. This is no masterpiece, but I guess it's worth seeing.
