the movie is far more sophisticated and intelligent is its exploration of sexual tension than such American attempts as 9 and a half weeks...the courtroom scene itself...with the couple copulating in the cage while the heroine pleads for their orgasm...is amazing...I have not seen this movie in 20 years...but it made indelible pictures in my mind...it is rich in texture and successful in creating a world where sex is the engine for all activity, and at its bottom is the yawning angst that lives in us all....the plot is European, and it meanders a bit, but so does life...especially when you are 17 and have a constant hard on....

If only this could have a decent story to make us more interested than just seeing a bizarre love story between a horny teenager and a beautiful and somewhat problematic woman. The problem is that "Diavolo in Corpo" ("Devil in the Flesh") begins well but ends so weak that there isn't much positive things to be said after this, and not even its most infamous moment deserves so much credit. It's a lifeless film that knows how to tease its viewers with a highly sensual and erotic story that grabs them all with an explicit sex scene, concluding with an absurd and ridiculous ending.

Nonetheless, somehow this has some good merits. Director Marco Bellocchio (from the great "Good Morning, Night") surely cast two interesting and beautiful stars for his love story; their acting abilities goes in between good and ferociously bad. Maruschka Detmers is very wild and sexy as the lady who tempts the life of the bello ragazzo Federico Pitzalis (amazingly his only screen credit), a young student deeply in love with her. The plot goes into show us that she's waiting her fianceé to be released from jail, arrested after his involvement in political activities against the government. The rest is a bunch of low and uninteresting surprises.

It's very unbelievable the romance between the boy and the woman, I mean, everything is so colorful, happy and happens too fast; sure they have problems, she's completely nuts and has some hysterical attacks, but there isn't much time to look deep into all that. These things might work but only if we're talking about fanfics (and sometimes they're better written than many films out there).

Those who complained about the film being difficult to follow I wonder how are they treating their brain. This is very easy to follow, the story has a good pace; it's just not that interesting except for the sex scenes. And those scenes are the highlight of this film, that's why people know about it and the reason why they give a try for it. Well, they're well filmed and very exciting. Now, about the famous scene where Detmers performs oral sex in Federico, it isn't so special if you've seen the one of "Brown Bunny" for instance. But it is real, and it's not that dark as many tend to say, it's clearly visible (if only that beautiful boy had a bigger product, if you know what I mean).

I don't know what ruined this film for me, if it was the awful soundtrack (it really hurts the ears) or the director's pretense in trying to make some political statements that simply didn't fit the plot no matter how hard he forced that on us. See it for yourself, kill your curiosity and like it or not. We all go a little silly, sometimes! And that's why films like this have a surprising ability to be viewed even almost 30 years of its making. 5/10

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.