The Nude Princess / La principessa nuda

Ajita Wilson, who plays the title character, was an African-American transgender male to female who found work in a number of European sexploitation films in the 1970s and 1980s -- including roles with Carlos Aured and Jess Franco -- before dying as a result of a road accident in 1987. While some of her roles, such as in Eva Man alongside the intersexed Eva Robins, played upon this aspect of her biography others, including this one, do not. (Robins may be most familiar to from his role as the woman in the red shoes in Tenebrae's flashback scenes.)

The Nude Princess is Miriam Zamota, a US-born former model with a law degree, who has since married Kaboto, the ruler of the African country of Taslamia. She is sent by her husband as the head of a trade delegation to Milan, Italy, with the job of negotiating Italian industrialists' construction of various public works and infrastructural projects in Taslamia.



One of the Italian trade delegates meets Miriam

The first complication is that the Italians do not intend to play fair: Rather than submitting separate tenders, they agree to collude and divide up the commissions between them. The second is the presence of an industrial spy Gladys, played by Tina Aumont. The third is the desire of scandal sheet journalist Marco, played by Luigi Pistilli, to catch Zamota in a compromising position. The fourth is the presence of protesters against Kaboto's regime, along with dissidents and refugees from it.

Some of these complications prove more easily resolved than others -- the Italian businessmen and the industrial spy are smitten by Zamota's beauty. Others prove more complicated, notably Zamota's relations with her countryfolk. For when Zamota is taken to a 'primitive'/'native' religious ceremony/drug party/orgy she has a flashback to a traumatic incident, revealing a previously unknown (or repressed) facet to her relationship with Kaboto. Here, in the Germaine Greer influenced feminist discourse then current she remarks “I’m a female eunuch”



One of the ceremony/party/orgy participants

Writer/director Cesare Canevari has a filmography that can best be described as unusual. Over the course of 20 years he directed nine features, five of which I have now seen: A Hyena in a Strongbox; Matalo!; I, Emmanuelle; this, and The Gestapo's Last Orgy. The main characteristics of these are that they fit into identifiable genres or filone -- Hyena is a crime thriller with Gothic overtones -- but don't always quite play as you would expect -- Matalo! is a Western, but one that seems to dispense with the main antagonist too early on, then presents some Antonioni-esque “dead time” in a deserted town, not to mention a boomerang throwing protagonist.

The one with most in common with The Nude Princess is probably the following year's Nazisadism entry. Both are unsurprisingly exploitative and sleazy, with extensive nudity and softcore sex, yet also have a degree of socio-political comment and artistry to them.

The main theme is the legacies of colonialism, both for the European and the African. Kaboto professes that the only white man he respects is Adolf Hitler, while his dictatorship is presented as a positive, Westernising force in the promotional film shown.



Mocking the neo-colonialist?

The main method, as expressed by this film within the film and Pistilli's occupation, is to constantly make us aware of the mediated nature of the images presented. For elsewhere the image is rarely stable, with Canevari liking to zoom in and out, move the camera independently of the characters, and rapidly cross-cutting between seemingly unconnected scenes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's tiresome. A nice touch is when he presents us with a line of four character's faces, racking focus to bring three of them into sharp relief, one after the other.

In sum, one of those films that's not quite art, but not quite trash either. Or, to put it another way, the kind of film I tend to like...

Delitto Carnale / Killing of the Flesh

After the death of their wealthy patriarch, the assorted members of a family assemble at an isolated hotel to wait for the funeral, the reading of the will, and the division of the estate.

With nothing to do but wait, those assembled seek to distract themselves as they know how: Having sex, arguing, fighting, playing practical jokes, or just drinking (J&B, naturally).


An emblematic image: tired, weary, bored

There is also the first indication that this is indeed a giallo, when one of the few servants in the hotel is seen on the phone, announcing that she knows the patriarch did not die in a road accident but was murdered, and that she also knows the identity of the killer.

What we don’t get, however, is a murder scene – or at least not for a while. Instead we get lesbians in the bath and heterosexual no-becomes-yes rape-becomes-consensual sex scenes.

Finally, after one particularly heavy night of debauchery – we are now more than half way through the 80-odd minutes running time – one of the family is found dead, clearly murdered.

The police are called. While they take the dead woman’s body away they do not begin an investigation, instead leaving those present to sort things out for themselves. A couple more murders result and the guilty party is outed. The end.

Delitto Carnale / Killing of the Flesh marks the end in more ways than one, being the last film from writer-director Cesare Canevari and the last film to star Marc Porel, who died the same year as it was released, 1983.

Canevari has an interesting filmography which includes the spaghetti western on acid Matalo!, the first Italian Emmanuelle film, Io Emmanuelle, and the self-explanatory Last Orgy of the Third Reich.

In fact, however, that should be seemingly self-explanatory. Last Orgy of the Third Reich has certain serious and artistic pretensions in the Night Porter, Salon Kitty or Salo mould. There’s the hint its not just being unpleasant for the sake of it, in that ‘how much of this can you take?’ way, but also asking about why you are ‘taking this’ in the first place.

In its own way Delitto Carnale is similar: How much ennui and boredom can you put up with and why? Do these composition and camera movements – and there are some pleasing and effective ones, including the discovery of the body and sequences in cobweb-filled storerooms and the patriarch’s modernist apartment – constitute sufficient reason for watching? Is it ‘for real’ or a parody in which everything is ironicised, distanced, estranged, ‘in quotes’? Just how critical is its vision of sex and dying in high society?

There’s no definitive answer, of course. And, as always, this is its source of strength, weakness, frustration and interest as a piece of Euro-trash. In this regard, it’s perhaps telling that the film was released in various different cuts, some inserting hardcore material for the raincoater crowd: If all else fails, you can always try to sneak something subversive in via the lowest-common-denominator sex film.

Recommended to those who have seen and can appreciate (read: see something in) the likes of Play Motel, The Curse of Ursula (for a Porel / Magniolfi giallo trash double bill) and Giallo a Venezia; it’s also recommended that you take a shower afterwards...

Thanks to the good people at Cinemageddon for making the film available and fan-subbing it.