Il Mondo porno di due sorelle / Emanuelle and Joanna

Given its title and the presence of an Emanuela amongst the sisters, the casual viewer could easily be forgiven for mistaking Il Mondo porno di due sorelle for a retitling of Joe D’Amato’s Emanuelle e Francoise le sorelline of a few years earlier. It is in fact, however, a different film, albeit one that still represents another entry into the Italian Emmanuelle knock offs in its approach.

Emanuela is played by Sherry Buchanan, a somewhat mysterious actress whose name suggests Anglophone origins but whose screen appearances were invariably in Italian productions and co-productions and who must have been in or barely out of her teens when she made her debut in What Have They Done to Your Daughters, playing a schoolgirl involved in a prostitution ring. (Presumably someone able to lip-read, and thereby determine if Buchanan is speaking her lines in Italian or English can clarify.)

Here, meanwhile, she’s a young housewife, frustrated by her husband Roberto’s lack of affection, physical and emotional cruelties and general unreconstructed male attitudes. ("C'mon get undressed. I'm really in the mood to show you a thing or two") Worse, she comes to suspect that Roberto’s having an affair with her own sister, Giovanna, who keeps disappearing off the radar without explanation. Roberto, however, denies the accusation, telling her in most unreassuringly that he doesn’t “like girls who are built like little boys.”

Emanuela decides to tail Giovanna, finding her sister playing tongue hockey with another woman, then entering a mysterious establishment. Emanuela follows and learns that the place is a brothel, specializing in catering to those with more esoteric, risque proclivities.

Emanuela soon starts visiting the place on a regular basis, as a Belle de jour / fantasy / revenge scenario begins to take shape...

With some surprisingly artful compositions; an intelligent exploration of Emanuela’s neuroses and their origins; effective, uninhibited and committed performances; and an agreeable selection of musical cues, this is one of those entries that offers something beyond the lowest common denominators of sex and sleaze.


Buchanan and Montenero as the two sisters

If a extra-diegetic awareness that Paola Montenero, playing Giovanna, developed a drug problem and appeared in the self-explanatory porn entry Dolce gola / Sweet Throat, adds an uncomfortable frisson to the image of her character snorting cocaine, those without such knowledge cannot fail to miss the way in which director Franco Rossetti uses mirrors and emphasise both voyeuristic and exhibitionistic scenarios in a way that does not always accord with the “visual pleasure” of the implied male spectator. How does the notion of a sadistic male gaze work when we are watching a man, dressed in an oversize nappy, being masochistically humiliated for his own pleasure by a prostitute playing the role of his mother? No doubt there is a way it can be made to fit the theory, or the theory to fit the example, but the need for such intellectual contortions indicates, I would argue, that things in the real world just aren’t that straightforward.

In sum, worth your attention