The following review contains several spoilers:

Avere vent'anni or To Be Twenty is a story about two twenty year old women who meet up on beach and instantly have things in common and inevitably become friends.

Tina who is the feisty and rebellious one and Lia who is more sensible and innocent. The two ladies want to have fun and enjoy life so are looking for liberation and after stealing some food from a local supermarket go on to find a commune for shelter. Whilst they are there all the men apart from the owner appear to be stoned and not capable of doing much especially when the owner says to the girls they can stay there rent free if they sleep with the men. The only other woman at the commune is finding it a struggle to look after three babies.

Tina and Lia decide they don't want to have to sell themselves in order to stay at the commune and instead decide to sell encyclopedias for the owner in order to continue staying there. They encounter a few strange people with Lia having another young woman who is lesbian makes advances towards her.

Things change at the commune when a film crew arrive and want to do a documentary on the people living there, only Tina and Lia talk to them and then we get to find out more about their backgrounds which were not pleasant as they grew up. Then they get mixed up within police corruption and the commune is searched for drugs from an apparent tip off which results in the girls being deported.

There are two versions of this film with the longest running for around 94 minutes, in it's uncut form this is the version you should see which may have English subtitles.

I wont give away the last fifteen minutes of the film although what started off as a comedy/drama film with some nudity and a pop soundtrack which reflects on the different stages in the women's journeys transcends into a much more debatable topic of what i would class as a thriller of not only how women are represented but also how men can treat them and the consequences of peoples actions.

Yes after watching the full version of this film people will compare it to several other exploitation films made around its time period although with this one it has three things that make an immediate impact. 1) The women come across as likable characters 2)The justice system in general 3)You can't always have authority or power and retain it.

For me it had one of the most memorable endings i have ever seen which i would never forget and if the director set out to achieve the maximum impact then i think he did it successfully.

I would rate this film 6 out of 10.

Some time in the mid-70s, out-of-luck director Fernando di Leo had a million dollar idea: Why not do a remake of one of the top grossing blockbusters of 1969, with a slightly altered tagline: "Two chicks went looking for Italia and couldn't find it anywhere." And since those chicks would hitchhike across the country to join a hippie community, they didn't even need those pricey motorbikes! The Captain America role went to Euro teen star blonde Gloria Guida, the Billy part to the lesser-known Lilli Carati, a downright stunning brunette literally acting out every single word of her dialogue: „I'm young, hot, and p*ssed off. Does anybody here f*ck?" A radically pessimistic statement from the bleak opening beach scene to the unforeseeable (and utterly disgusting) climax, Avere vent'anni bites off more than di Leo could chew: His counterculture swan song about two female libertines who inescapably will go to the dogs never finds a rhythm, a loose, sloppy concoction of scenes that don't blend, a programmatic reading from Valerie Solanas's SCUM manifesto („A pip-squeak with dysfunctional femininity that despises women: That is man.") remaining fairly more than a nod to the feminist zeitgeist in Fernando's T&A exploitation circus. Two stars for the boisterous performance of the lead actresses, reciprocating between vulnerability, sexual aggression, and pure, breathless joie de vivre, especially in the dance scene on the piazza; another one for Ray Lovelock's fine interpretation of a disenchanted druggie, and one and a half for the super catchy theme song. Ah, and as for Signorina Carati: Eat your heart out, Dennis Hopper.