剧情介绍
Invisibility was the destiny of Cavallone’s next films. Shot in Summer 1979 and released in May ’80, Blow Job – Soffio erotico (1980: once again a Warholian title, even though the original was supposed to be La strega nuda/The Naked Witch) was an extremely rushed production14. Shooting originally had to take place entirely in a villa near Riolo, in North-East Italy, near the city of Faenza15. But after one of the producers committed suicide during filming, Cavallone had to radically rethink the project, as he suddenly found himself with no money at all. The extreme poverty shows throughout the film, and it’s sad to see how the director had to work virtually with nothing. Yet the result is strangely fascinating. Technically, Blow Job is hardcore porn, since it does feature several explicit sex scenes. Nevertheless, it is the closest Cavallone came to make a gothic horror movie: at times, it almost looks like a thinking man’s version of a Luigi Batzella film (think of Nuda per Satana, 1974, for instance). Its complex, Escherian plot deserves a detailed summary.
The opening sequence is truly unsettling in itself: the first images show the park of a luxurious villa, with secular trees under a rainstorm, then a subjective camera enters a squalid hotel hall, accompanied by a gloomy music, like a sort of malevolent, eerie present: the film’s two main settings are introduced and shown as strictly complementary – a hint at what will follow. Cut to a naked couple in a room: actors Stefano Vicinelli (Danilo Micheli) and Diana (Anna Massarelli) don’t have the money to pay the bill. With an embarassed phone call, the hotel clerk asks them to pay the hotel fee and leave. Meanwhile, upstairs, a woman is menaced by someone or something unseen. She screams and cries for help, then jumps out of the window. The aftermath of her fall looks like an outtake from Joe D’Amato film, with intestines spilled all over the pavement. ("Hey," Stefano says, "it looks like somebody threw a bowl of spaghetti upside down!"). Stefano and Diana take advantage of the ensuing chaos and leave. At a racetrack, Stefano meets a scarred woman in her forties, Angela (Anna Bruna Cazzato), who helps him pick a winning horse, and in return asks them a ride to her villa in the countryside: she wants Dario to help her "pass the gate". During the trip they meet a trio of surreal characters, while Stefano glimpses – and it’s an impressive, eerie moment – a biker whose head looks like a skull. At the villa, a sinister-looking, equally scarred butler, Alphonse (Valerio Isidori16) awaits them. Then, even stranger things ensue. Angela puts a spell on Diana, who gets inexplicably ill; Stefano goes looking for a doctor and meets a young, beautiful woman named Sibilla (Mirella Venturini), who gives him a magic powder to cure Diana. Blow Job’s second half conveys a weird dreamlike quality. Angela and Diana leave Stefano alone in the villa and leave for a ball: in the middle of the night Sibilla comes out of a mirror and takes Stefano to a cave, where she hypnotizes him and they makes love. Cavallone was especially proud of the sequence, especially the 360° shots following Sibilla as she moves in circles around the man, like a predator.
Another beautiful, eerie moment is the scene where Stefano, in pitch black darkness, finds himself surrounded by a group of old men carrying candles who start waltzing around him; when lights turn on, a ball is revealed to be taking place in the villa’s huge salon: the dancers – many of whom wear grotesque masks – are reflected on mirrors all over a wall and Alphonse operates a bull’s eye on the participants. Apparently, Stefano is in two different places at the same time: in the cave with Sibilla and at the villa, with a naked Diana seemingly in a hypnotic trance, dancing with