Mother's Heart

Having dropped out of university, he was quick to get behind the camera with his highly acclaimed first film “Come Play With Me (Grazie, zia)” (1968), which was made in the wake of “Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca)” (1965) directed by Marco Bellocchio, from which he got his main actor (Lou Castel) and strong anti-bourgeois connotations. However, unlike his model, he puts his foot down on the accelerator of morbidity, thus ushering in Italian eroticism. In his successive films “Mother’s Heart (Cuore di mamma)” (1969) and “Uccidete il vitello grasso e arrostitelo” (1970), the themes of youth protest and the breakdown of the family return with little success. Perhaps this is also why Samperi elected to change genre and focus on the satire of custom, but achieving the same poor results with “An Eel Worth 300 Million (Un’anguilla da 300 milioni)” (1971) and “Beati i ricchi” (1972). In 1973 the director hailing from Italy’s Veneto region made his best, most successful film: upon its release “Malizia” broke all box office records and earned sexy Laura Antonelli enormous popularity. The film, set in ‘50s Sicily, is a skilful blend of Radiguet meets Brancati in its portrayal of the rise of a saucy waitress to the status of lady, paved with senile dementia and adolescent erotic agitation. This winning formula is repeated in “Lovers and Other Relatives (Peccato veniale)” (1974), in which again it is Antonelli who stimulates the unconfessable desires of a young boy. The result is pleasing enough, although somewhat inferior to the prototype. Afterwards, Samperi brought Bonvi’s cartoon strip characters to the screen in “Stormtroopers (Sturmtruppen)” (1976); adapted a novel by Cesare Lanza with tasteful elegance with “Nenè” (1977) as well as one of Umberto Saba’s most best novels with “Ernesto” (1978): but it was only with “Liquirizia” (1979), a colourful look back at the pre-1968 anger of the provinces, that he recovered his best form. His work of the ’80s, alas, focuses on decadence: from the glossy osé of “The Dark Side of Love (Fotografando Patrizia)” (1984) to Genet in fake leather in “The Corruption (La bonne)” (1986), scraping the bottom of the barrel with the suffering symphony of impotence in “Malizia 2 Mila (Malizia 2000)” (1991), a clumsy attempt at turning back the clock to the tastes of the public twenty years ago. —RAI