Tinto Brass: Pronounced br-ASS

Sometimes I wonder whether I'm a pervert. It bothers me a little, because I really don't want to be thought of as this totally depraved guy. Fortunately, there are men like Tinto Brass, whose "art" shows that even if I am perverted, I'm not alone.

I had seen CALIGULA a few years ago and thought it was pretty sexy, but not all that interesting otherwise. I recently saw COSI FAN TUTTE, and was actually struck by it. Not only is it very sexy, but it's an interesting movie about love, marriage, and sex, and how hard it is to balance the three. Like all Italian movies that I've seen, it lags about three quarters of the way through, but there are a number of really touching scenes where the characters have to confront, and overcome, the tension between their perversions and their love.

The basic story rotates around a wife, played by the extremely cute Claudia Koll, who begins to desire anal sex after this guy almost gives it to her in the bathroom at a party. Her husband, on the other hand, has a fetish for the stories she tells him about her having sex with other men. He thinks they're all made up, but many of them are true. He won't give his wife anal sex because he doesn't like the thought of it. When she meets the man from the party in Venice and he gives her what she wants, she tells her husband about it, and at first he's turned on, but then he realizes it's not a story, but the truth, and he gets mad.

I've read descriptions where people want to call this movie porn, but it's not at all. It is explicit, and it does have a lot of sex, but it's not pornographic. The reason why it's not is, I think, essential to the way genre works, and I'll address the functionality of genre in an upcoming post.