LickQ-icon

An impor­tant part of  why Radley Metzger is one the pre­mier direc­tors of erot­ica is the fact that he under­stood the cru­cial eroge­nous zone in the human body is the mind.  His fil­mog­ra­phy is full of films that chal­lenge the audience’s mind even as it is appeal­ing to their more pruri­ent inter­ests.  The Lickerish Quartet is great exam­ple of his abil­ity to engage the viewer on both intel­lec­tual and erotic lev­els: while it deliv­ers the expected amounts of skin and sin, there’s much more going on under the sur­face here.

In true Metzger style, The Lickerish Quartet opens with a lofty quote (from Luigi Pirandello) before sketch­ing out its main trio of char­ac­ters.  None are given names: instead, they are defined by their famil­ial rela­tion­ships.  The cas­tle owner (Frank Wolff) is the patri­arch of the group, a dri­ven, self-absorbed type who thinks noth­ing of screen­ing a skin flick in the den for his fam­ily.  His wife (Erika Remberg) plays along with his whim but hangs back with a cool sense of remove from the sit­u­a­tion.  Their son (Paolo Turco) looks on with dis­ap­proval.  Unlike them, he refuses to be jaded and prefers to lose him­self in hob­bies like magic and old reli­gious stories.

Unbeknownst to this trio, the film the father has unspooled will intro­duce a shock­ing ele­ment of change and seduc­tion into their lives.  In the evening, they attend a car­ni­val and see a brunette stunt rider — known only as the vis­i­tor (Silvana Venturelli) — who looks exactly like a strik­ing blonde they saw in the stag film. The cas­tle owner bring her home with the rest of the fam­ily so he can con­front her with the film — but the screen­ing does no go as planned.  In fact, the bar­rier between fan­tasy and real­ity breaks down as the vis­i­tor works her way through the fam­ily in a uniquely seduc­tive manner.

The end result is erot­ica with an unusu­ally provoca­tive and artsy edge to it.  The Lickerish Quartet takes what could have been a sim­ple soft­corn porn premise and trans­forms it into a sexed-up ver­sion of Teorema.  The script was penned by Michael DeForrest, who also did the hon­ors for Camille 2000, and he delights into blur­ring the bar­ri­ers between the cel­lu­loid and human worlds. Characters shift back and forth between these set­tings in a way that sug­gest real­ity becomes liq­uid once “the vis­i­tor” is intro­duced to the story.  DeForrest also adds an extra level of inter­est to the sex scenes by giv­ing each a unique visual con­text and tone that cor­re­sponds to the par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter being seduced.

Metzger takes the play­fully sur­real tone of DeForrest’s script and runs with it: he blends color with black & white (the pho­tog­ra­phy by Hans Jura is beau­ti­fully lit) and uses trippy edit­ing schemes to under­line the shifts in real­ity.  He also makes the most of the dif­fer­ent set­tings for the seduc­tions, espe­cially a library sequence that incor­po­rates a novel set fea­tur­ing var­i­ous naughty words and their def­i­n­i­tions laid out on the floor.  The image of Wolff and Venturelli rolling around naked atop these words is one of the film’s most mem­o­rably visual con­ceits. Amedeo Selfa’s  edit­ing style gives shape to these moments, adding punchy and baroque visual rhythms where needed, and Stelvio Cipriani’s blend of lounge and orches­tral scor­ing shifts to and fro beau­ti­fully to cap­ture the ever-changing moods.

Finally, the act­ing is way bet­ter than you might expect from an erotic film.  Wolff was a famil­iar Italian actor of the late 1960’s (he has a mem­o­rable bit at the begin­ning of Once Upon A Time In The West) and he brings an admirable inten­sity to his work here while Remberg lends an icy sub­t­lety to the wife to off­set him.  Turco adds the right naïveté, blend­ing intel­li­gence and emo­tional vul­ner­a­bil­ity, to make the son the most sym­pa­thetic of the char­ac­ters.  Finally, Venturelli owns her role as the mys­tery seduc­tress com­pletely, using her beauty as a sphinx-like mask as she alters her per­sona to match the other char­ac­ters’ fan­tasies.  She’s beguil­ing and aloof all at once, just what the film needs.

In short, The Lickerish Quartet is another Metzger gem.  It makes sur­re­al­ism seem like play­ful, sexy fun.