Movieline Online

THE FLICK: Although it was the first movie since Emmanuelle to be marketed as a mainstream film with an “X”-rating, it’s obvious director Marco Bellocchio is using sex much the same way Spielberg used violence in Saving Private Ryan. In other words, there’s a point to all that heavy breathing besides just juvenile titillation. What that point is, however, is quite challenging to discern, since Devil in the Flesh is a film that shatters itself in three or four thematic pieces. First is the surface level plot about a daydreaming schoolboy, Giacomo (Frederico Pitzalis), who falls passionately in love with Guillia (Maruschka Detmers), the emotionally (and perhaps mentally) unstable fiancé of an Italian terrorist. As their affair deepens, Guillia’s emotional state becomes more and more unstable; alternately pushing the two lovers apart and then pulling them back together. Meanwhile, their fate as a couple seems doomed by the impending release of Guillia’s fiancé and his overprotective mothe...

THE FLICKS: The “dream logic” prevalent in most of Dario Argento’s work serves as both ammunition for his critics and an inspiration for his fans. For those looking for flaws, it’s as if the director explains away his underdeveloped scripts and over stylized visual technique with a Pee-Wee Herman-esque “I meant to do that!” And certainly, for a filmmaker with Argento’s background, he should be able to balance his Giallo murder-mysteries with a degree of literary panache to match his technical bravado. But both Trauma and the more recent The Card Player still find the director, who was once labeled “The Italian Hitchcock,” treading water in the genre that made his career. The first film Argento shot in America, Trauma also features his daughter, Asia, in her first leading role as an anorexic Romanian on the run from the administrator of a mysterious psychological institution. Befriending, and eventually romancing, a local news artist, the two set out to find a serial killer who beheads ...