Black Angel

A film by Tinto Brass, the purveyer of 70s-style soft porn, all stockings and suspenders, swaying boobs, bent over as$es. It belongs to another era, before video and DVD, before the freeze frame and the chapter selection. You'd have to sit and watch the titillation unfold, unable to speed things up or cut to the action.

That said, the women are far removed from the hard, anonymous, blonde Croydon-facelifts of hardcore, they have a bit of va-va-vooom! Some of the couplings did put me in mind of the school librarian being chatted up by the hopeful deputy head, it's that sort of world.

This film is set in Venice in the dying months of the Second World War. It has an enjoyable European sensibility that is refreshing and some of the photography of wartime Venice is lovely, especially the dawn shots, which are often used to great effect in war films, the only respite from human cruelty and betrayal, a vivid stripping back to essentials.

The story is about an aristocratic woman (Anna Galiena, very good) falling for a young blond brute of a Nazi, cheating on her husband. It's all very straightforward. Generally you'd think you couldn't go wrong with a classy sex orgy featuring Nazi uniforms, cocaine and blow jobs, but thanks to the composer - Ennio Morricone no less - using oboes and trumpets to fashion a comical, inquisitive little tune better suited to the playout credits of Miss Marple Investigates on Sunday afternoon, they manage to...

I can't officially recommend it - it's kind of rubbish really - but it has something going for it, you can see where Paul Verhoven got his inspiration for Black Books, and it's all a bit Allo Allo without the laughs (which some may prefer, of course).

Tinto Brass approaches this wartime melodrama like someone determined to prove you can drown a potentially interesting premise in so much flesh that the story gasps for air. Anna Galiena commits fully to Livia's transformation from repressed wife to unhinged libertine, and there are moments, brief ones, where you see real hunger and desperation flicker across her face. She is not performing titillation; she is performing need, which makes the film's best scenes land with uncomfortable weight. Gabriel Garko as Helmut is all sculptured jawline and predatory confidence, a fantasy object who exists less as a character and more as a vessel for Livia's projections. He does what he can with material that requires him to smolder and command but never quite become human.

The problem is not the nudity or the sex, it is that Brass seems far more interested in arranging bodies than excavating the psychology driving them. The orgy sequences are elaborate, meticulously staged tableaux that feel clinical despite their explicitness; you watch them the way you might watch a Baroque painting come to life, admiring the composition while feeling oddly detached. There is a scene early on where Livia masturbates after her husband fails her yet again, and it is genuinely affecting because Galiena plays it with frustration rather than performance. That vulnerability gets buried under increasingly absurd set pieces involving fake phalluses, urination, and enough full frontal nudity to make you forget there was supposed to be a war happening outside.

The film wants to position Livia's erotic awakening against the collapse of Fascist Italy, drawing some parallel between personal and political disintegration, but it never earns that thesis. The Nazis and partisans function as set dressing rather than meaningful context; they provide ambient danger but no real stakes. You keep waiting for the external chaos to intersect with Livia's internal unraveling in a way that feels intentional rather than coincidental. It does not happen. Instead, you get Franco Branciaroli as the lecherous Ugo, leering his way through scenes with all the subtlety of a caricature, driving Livia to Venice in exchange for sex because apparently every man in this universe trades in transactions involving her body.

I kept thinking about Luchino Visconti's original "Senso," which Brass is ostensibly reworking here, and how that film understood that obsessive passion becomes tragic when it collides with history. This version replaces tragedy with spectacle, and the spectacle grows tiresome. There is a moment, maybe two thirds in, where Livia watches Helmut casually betray her trust, and Galiena plays it with such hollow-eyed devastation that you remember the film could have been about something. Then it cuts to another bordello scene with more breasts and rear nudity and the spell breaks.

The cinematography occasionally delivers something striking: a shot of Livia silhouetted against Venetian light, the way bodies are framed in mirrors during sex scenes to suggest fragmentation. The score leans into melodrama without apology, swelling at moments of heightened emotion in ways that feel almost operatic. But these flourishes cannot compensate for a script that confuses repetition with intensity. By the third orgy, you are not shocked or aroused or even particularly engaged; you are checking your watch.

This will appeal to viewers seeking erotic period pieces unafraid of explicit content and those curious about Tinto Brass's particular aesthetic fixations. It will frustrate anyone hoping for psychological depth or narrative momentum, and it will bore those who need characters to evolve beyond their basest impulses. If you want melodrama steeped in wartime decay with actual emotional stakes, revisit Visconti. If you want decadence for its own sake, photographed with glossy period detail and performed with occasional conviction, this delivers exactly that, nothing more.

This is my fifth excursion in Tinto Brass territory but only the third from his (mostly) softcore entries for which he became notorious. Having seen the man in the flesh at the midnight screening of his rare pop-art thriller DEADLY SWEET (1967) during the 61st Venice Film Festival in 2004, he seemed more like a reasonably literate and genuinely larger-than-life character perennially chomping on his cigar than a dirty old man who occasionally realizes his erotic fantasies on film.

Although the majority of his later films were modest exploitation stuff at best, sometimes he did seek to be taken more seriously by breaking into the mainstream and even art-house circles. The Nazisploitation epic SALON KITTY (1975) was the first of such attempts, the misconceived debacle CALIGULA (1979) was the most infamous with THE KEY (1983) being perhaps the most successful of the lot. Unfortunately, Blue Underground's 2-Disc Set of SALON KITTY has been out-of-print for some time but I do have THE KEY on VHS recorded off Italian TV.

BLACK ANGEL, then, is Tinto Brass' latest bid for respectability. Based on the same source novel from which Luchino Visconti made an acclaimed movie in 1954, Brass transposes the action to the last days of WWII and, true to his nature, has the promiscuous characters indulge wholeheartedly (and explicitly, including some hardcore footage) in every sin of the flesh he can point his camera at for two hours. The major set-piece of the film is a marathon 10-minute orgy sequence which includes most of the offending footage but also quaint, risible stuff like a group of revelers marching in tow through the rooms of a château led by a naked woman proudly holding onto a huge, gold-plated phallus!

For what it's worth, the plot deals with a young, blond, womanizing Nazi officer (Gabriel Garko) who sets his sights on a much older Italian aristocrat (Anna Galiena) who is only to keen to satisfy his every whim. Naturally, he is reluctant to cut down on his vices (which also include gambling) and far from happy with her overly jealous demeanor; after surprising him in bed with a much younger girl, the Italian woman eventually takes belated revenge by betraying him to his commanding officers regarding his plans for desertion.

While the film as a whole is not too badly done in itself and features an Ennio Morricone score to boot, nothing especially memorable happens in it and one is hard pressed to feel sympathy for these lewd, unlikable and opportunistic characters and, consequently, the viewer's interest in the proceedings rises and sags accordingly.

Very good movie, well worth watching. Not like the other Timto Brass movies I've seen. Even though Livia was no angel and certainly did wrong, the Lt got what he deserved. I was afraid it wasn't gonna go that way and backfire on Livia. She was very foolish! Whether it was love or lust or both, she was blinded. I thought the guy looked like a snake from the beginning but it all became clear when they went to the orgy. He was a snake!

I was quite amazed by this passionate, old-fashioned style tragic romance. The costumes, the cinematography, Ennio Morricone's sweeping score, all come together to create an absolute classic of it's genre. Anna Galiena and Gabriel Garko are beautiful together as doomed lovers that find each other in the desperate, waning days of the second World War. Helmut Schulz, played by the impossibly sensual Garko, is a sleazy and corrupt young SS officer, addicted to gambling, women, and to other of life's excesses. His decadent lifestyle does not come cheap, and when the beautiful but lonely Livia, (in an amazingly elegant performance by the wonderful Anna Galiena) offers to financially support Helmut, the amoral man does not refuse. Director Tinto Brass photographs the present day in glorious black and white, while we see, in blazing color the erotic love affair as it unfolded, in a series of flashbacks described by Livia, while en route to Venice. "Senso 45/Black Angel" is Tinto Brass' most serious work. It seems like he wanted to create something impressive here, and he did just that. A much more accomplished film than his "Salon Kitty." Effectively capturing the decadence of Fascist Italy, 1945 in a dizzying orgy scene, filled with graphic and strange sexuality and drug taking, a trademark of Tinto Brass, and unforgettable images of Anna and her SS lover in desperate embraces in shadowy back alleys or sparse rooms, with rays of sunlight filtering through lace curtains. It is hard to describe the beauty and elegance of this film. For fans of erotic romance, and films that possess this specifically European style of film making, this intoxicating art-house film is certain to impress. As of yet "Black Angel" has not had a DVD release for North America, but there is a wonderful edition from the UK that offers an uncensored, widescreen version, in original Italian with English subtitles.