I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Bellocchio refers to this as a mainly political movie, a description of the revolutionary movement in Italy, but that seems more metaphor than reality. Well, almost everything in the movie seems like metaphor. The revolutionaries, of whom we see and about whom we learn very little, might as well be mafiosi. Out with the old and in with the new.Andrea's Papa, a psychoanalyst, seems to stand for the usual traditional bourgeois values -- morally upright, unperturbed, clean and tidy, thoroughly ritualized.Giullia, the girlfriend of a revolutionary, seems to represent what can happen to someone who needs very badly a cause to support but is unable to muster up the kind of devotion such a commitment demands. (I'm guessing here.) Andrea, the adolescent boy, seems to be the only guy in the movie who is not in some unquiet way "upatz." He's respectful of his father but disobedient too. He loves Giullia, or so we assume, although he's not really old enough to have learned how to manage his reflexes optimally, but he leaves her in order to show up at school and complete his final exams. His course between these contradictory lifestyles could be described as "media." He's the man in between, who knows the meaning of gradualism, who can keep his cool while those about him are screaming.Most of this is summed up during the oral part of his finals when he is asked to translate and comment on an excerpt from "Antigone," which contrasts the traditional authority of the gods with the notion of secularity and free will.That brings us -- by no particular course that I'm aware of -- to Marushka Detmars. She brings to mind a New Yorker cartoon of a few years ago. Two hippos are neck-deep in the river, staring at a gazelle drinking from the bank, and one hippo says to the other, "I hate her." She's a good actress. (Let me get that out of the way.) But so is everyone else in the film. She carries with her, in her speech and manner, the rich glitter of outright lunacy. And it all comes from the actress too, not from directorial aid. Detmars isn't nuts the way Catherine DeNeuve was nuts in "Repulsion." The walls don't turn to rubber and grow hands. Instead, we see her animated -- sometimes TOO animated. And she gives us shocking jolts when her mood abruptly changes and becomes threatening the way a looming thunderstorm is threatening.A critic described her as sultry, but that's probably not the word he was searching for. She's compellingly beautiful with her fluffy brown hair, her wide white ready grin, her impulsive giggles. And her eyes are like the eyes in the paintings on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs. The sexy parts are pretty erotic, not so much because one of them is explicit, but because we've gotten to know the characters involved. (It's more interesting to spy on the honeymoon couple next door than go to a skin flick.) Actually there isn't THAT much sex. There is only one scene of simulated intercourse but the director lets it play out in what seems to be real time. At least real time for an eighteen-year-old boy.The young man who plays Andrea is fine too, which is a necessary thing, because the film depends almost entirely on him and Giullia. They have to carry it and they do. If it were not for their performances, I'm not sure this would be as interesting or as admirable flick as it is. It could easily have been turned into a rather slow, boring romance.Worth it.

Notable because of it's notorious explicit scene when the gorgeous Maruschka Detmers takes her young lover's penis from his trousers and into her mouth. Even without this moment the film is a splendid if slightly disturbing passionate and blindingly sexy ride. Detmers puts in a great performance as the partly deranged, insatiable delight, wandering about her flat nude. Dressed, partly dressed and naked she steals most of the film about love, sexual passion, philosophy and politics. For me the last two get a little lost and the ending is most confusing when her fiancé is released whilst fellow terrorists are released, she seems uncertain as to who she wants and the young lover seems more interested in his exams than anything else as she weeps, beautifully of course!

This film was at times very difficult to follow. Every time it got interesting it would jump to another scene. I'm not sure if it was my perception because the translation may have been a little flawed. Even though I was watching sub titles I did think that Maruschka Detmers was terrific. She is also very beautiful and if anything else it is worth seeing this film just for that one famous scene. It's pretty cool to watch a dramatic film and have a scene like that. Overall it was a decent movie.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)I watched "the original X-rated theatrical version" (gee, lucky me) and I can tell you Maruschka Detmers has headlights that point very sharply in the direction they want to go. She is also very pretty, although I'm not sure she is prettier than her co-star, Federico Pitzalis. Clearly, she is taller. Yes, this is a very sexy movie, which some might say is its raison d'etre, but that's really beside the point. What matters here is school-boy wish fulfillment, a little self-indulgence by Director Marco Bellocchio.Well, why not? It isn't often that the boy gets the beautiful woman, especially when in competition with his suave father, a handsome and distinguished psychiatrist, and her fiancé, a well-heeled and attractive terrorist. I mean, this could happen, couldn't it?I didn't see the original French version of 1946, in which the terrorist was a soldier in World War I. I understand it was better. I'm willing to bet that Bellocchio saw it and had the sort of relationship with it that a later generation had with Star Wars, e.g., and just had to relive the fantasy.Nonetheless, and having said all that, this is not a bad movie. I'm not sure who is supposed to be the "devil in the flesh," but Maruschka is worth the price of the ticket and then some.