Seven erotic stories: a guy wants to fix the antenna on the roof of the building in order to watch "Emmanuelle" on TV, but his girlfriend wants to do it there...A photographer is so charmed by his model that he sleeps with her...A gay actor tests if his fellow gay friend is in love with him...Employees Marko and Hana accidentally meet in a music store and decide to have sex there. He loses his erection when he finds out that she is not of Czech origin, but she still manages to bring him into the right mood...Two women and a man try out a threesome...A girl cheats on her boyfriend just minutes before they have a date...In the forest, a guy tricks a girl into having sex with him under the pretext that a nonexistent tick will pass from her vagina on to his penis.
"All this effort just to watch some porn?" - "It's not porn, it's an erotic film." - "What's the difference?" - "In penetration." This snappy (self-referential) dialogue aimed at educating the audience in distinguishing a simple porn from a sophisticated erotic art film that also juggles with some more complicated themes in life neatly illustrates the playful nature of "7 seX 7", the first (moderately) erotic Croatian film directed by a woman that tried to imitate the tone from Pasolini's cheerful "Decameron". Consisting out of two great stories and five solid ones, which all culminate in sex (except for the gay one, where the two men just kiss), this rare example of an untrammelled depiction of sensuality in the otherwise conservative country is indeed uneven, yet refreshing and stylistically pleasant since director Irena Skoric filmed each segment in a single, 10 minute long take, which causes awe both for the mise-en-scene and the tight acting with no mistakes in dialogues, even though explicit sex is not shown, as already alluded in the aforementioned dialogue. Five stories are, unfortunately, just mediocre and/or unrealistic (women don't have such casual sex with strangers without condoms), with only two standing out, one of which is chronologically the first one on the roof, shot in black and white, which abounds with humor, shrillness and a clever heroine, Gloria (Petra Tezak) who talks with her boyfriend who is fixing the TV antenna ("What happened to the antenna?" - "That swan was here again." - "What swan?" - "The one that weighs as much as Pazin turkey!" - "Why don't you shoot him?" - "I can't, he is protected!" - "By what? A bulletproof west?" - "No, the law! The law protects him!"). The sixth story is also suggestive, yet the movie never really repeats the magic and sharpness of that perfect first story that told more about those two characters than any other episode.
Grade:++
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