Saturday, January 18, 2025

Bambola

Bambola; erotic crime, Italy 1996; D: Bigas Luna, S: Valeria Marini, Jorge Perugorria, Stefano Dionisi, Manuel Bandera, Anita Ekberg

After their mother dies, Mina, nicknamed "Bambola", and her brother Flavio decide to close their goat butcher shop and open a pizza restaurant at their secluded home along the beach. Ugo, their business partner, becomes jealous and attacks Settimio who flirts with Mina, who kills him in self-defense. Mina visits Settimio in jail, but inadvertently gains a new fan, criminal Furio, who threatens to beat up Settimio unless she sleeps with him. Furio rapes Mina in his mental asylum jail cell. Upon release from prison, Furio moves in at Mina's and Flavio's home and starts having sex with her. When Furio has an argument with Flavio and chases him away, Mina flees from the house. Furio follows her, but just as he is about to rape her again, Flavio shoots him with a rifle.

After he reached creative highs with his Iberian trilogy ("Ham, Ham", "Golden Balls", "The Tit and the Moon"), the director Bigas Luna fell into creative lows during his excursion into the Italian cinema with this cheap, banal, vile and violent erotic crime film, showing that rape and sexual assault simply don't suit his mentality and wreck his sensual touch. "Bambola" is a disappointingly thin film in the vein of exploitation films, where a lot of problems could have been avoided if the characters simply acted logically. There is one good moment when the three protagonists want to go to a water park, but their business partner Ugo objects since Mina is still mourning after the funeral, but she simply brushes it off: "I'll wear a black bikini!" Cue to Mina wearing a black thong as she climbs up a water slide. The movie is destroyed, unfortunately, the minute the brute criminal Furio enters the story, since his violence and blackmail used to force Mina to have sex with is terrible and misguided. Maybe that was the point, to show the passivity of people who are petrified with fear and hesitate to react, which causes a bully to slowly take over their whole life, but the whole story is heavy-handed and clumsy. Too many illogical plot points bother: could Furio simply rape Mina, a guest, in his mental asylum prison cell, without nobody from the guards noticing? Could Furio later simply have been released from prison without any objections to his threat? When Furio decides to "settle down" at Mina's and Flavio's home, why didn't anybody of them call the police? It's not even clear what Mina's stance is regarding this "hostage situation": her narration mentions that Furio is an evil brute, but that she loves him. Why? It's a disgraceful shoehorning, even worse than "50 Shades of Grey", which pushes for a misguided notion of a woman who loves her abuser. Not much was made out of this crime film, which never reaches that enjoyment value.

Grade:+

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