The Kinky, Psychedelic Manipulations Of Femina Ridens

Piero Schivazappa’s ultra-stylish 1969 film is a subversive look at obsession, desire and the battle of the sexes.

Many years ago, I read the possibly apocryphal story about a review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that appeared in a hunting and fishing magazine, which complained that all the sex and melodrama got in the way of what was otherwise a very good story about a gamekeeper’s life in England. Femina Ridens seems to have suffered a similar fate over the years. I once read a piece about the film on a giallo website that spent a long time complaining about the fact that it just doesn’t work as a giallo and so should be dismissed as a failure, damned for not being a good example of a genre that it doesn’t belong to in the first place. For reasons unknown, Femina Ridens is regularly referred to as a giallo and then found lacking because it isn’t one. What can I say? Some of your more obsessive Italian film fanatics are a bit odd.

Admittedly, the film’s mistaken reputation hasn’t always been helped by distributors, who have often not quite known what to do with the film and have often marketed it to look like a horror movie on video release, something that seems almost to invite viewer disappointment. Notably, Femina Ridens has been called both The Frightened Woman and The Laughing Woman in English-language releases. If these rather contradictory titles are not a clue as to the film’s moral ambiguities and plot turns, I don’t know what is – and the truth is that both titles are reasonably accurate descriptions of what we see at various points along the way. This movie takes us in one direction then stops, turns and turns again, revealing that what we thought was happening is not what is happening. We’re going to discuss the film in some detail, so be warned: all these twists are about to be explored and if you think this will spoil the film for you, perhaps you should stop reading now. This film is not necessarily propelled by the plot twists or dependent on them to be an extraordinary audio-visual experience – but still, consider yourself on notice.

The basic narrative of the film is this: Mary, a press agent for a bizarre philanthropic agency, visits the home of the company director Dr Sayer in order to iron out a few questions about company policy for a publicity statement. He drugs her and holds her captive, torturing and humiliating her with the constant threat that he will kill her once he becomes bored. But it’s all a game for this amateur-hour De Sade – he normally hires sex workers for these weekend fantasies and his idea of tuning his fiction into a reality with Mary eventually collapses – he can’t complete his twisted plans as he is unable to go the distance and kill her. Throughout her torments, Mary has challenged him to see who he really is, offering to help save him from his fantasy world and find ‘normal’ love. He agrees and it seems as though the couple have made a new start – but Mary is now the one in control, slowly and subtly pushing him to greater and greater physical exertion despite his bad heart.

So that’s the simple synopsis – a tale of power and submission that switches from character to character. Sayer is never a very convincing sadist – he’s always trying that bit too hard, verbally berating and threatening Mary to such an extent that it feels as though he is trying to convince her (and, more importantly, himself) of his grand sadistic prowess. Mary, on the other hand, is always quietly in control even when being brutalised – the film manages to portray a fairly accurate depiction of BDSM power-play in this sense, where the submissive partner is often the one with the real control because all these games only work for as long as the sub is willing to submit to them. Even though the film shows what is theoretically non-consensual domination and submission, we are always aware that there is something more going on here. It’s no surprise, therefore, that we ultimately find that Sayer has been manipulated from the start, the sadist bested by the female praying mantis of his nightmares, a woman who has worked her way through arrogant man after man, apparently destroying them through her sexuality and, more importantly, their own belief in their sense of control. It is exactly this mistaken belief in their sexual potency and superiority that has brought men like Sayer down. In the end, he quite literally exhausts himself to impress this young woman, his misguided pride coming before the ultimate fall. Mary, on the other hand, manipulates him from the start, making him doubt his desires and then quietly destroying him, always with a knowing smirk on her face. If this film is a battle of the sexes – and it is certainly that – then the women are shown as the victors, and the idea of power, control, victimhood and consent are continually twisted and teased to the point where we end up as bewildered and exhausted as Sayer himself.

Beyond this though, and the reason why the film remains such an extraordinary experience, Femina Ridens is perhaps the archetypal 1960s pop art erotic fantasy, throwing us into a work of enhanced unreality from the very start, where the headquarters of the philanthropic organisation seems to be a huge, opulent museum rather than an office block with reception rooms as big as a house but containing nothing more than a desk, and where Sayer’s house is a minimalist, mechanised hymn to modernity and where he keeps a life-sized dummy duplicate of himself under the bed as a sexual substitute to mask his own inadequacies. The film is almost surreal in its use of colour, set design and costume, with an extraordinary selection of decor, his-and-hers matching showers and mechanised drying units, amphibious cars and bright, vivid colours and costumes. There are unexplained set pieces (like the steam train carrying sax-playing women that the couple encounter as a non-too-subtle bit of fellatio symbolism) and visual props that could stand as works of art, like an Allan Jones-inspired bondage mannequin, trussed up and suspended from the ceiling. In perfect accompaniment to all of this, Stelvio Cipriano’s score is a masterful slice of Sixties lounge grooviness, with everything coming together in a funky, sexy dance sequence from Dagmar Lassander, effortlessly seductive and continually self-aware as Mary.

Lassander, a somewhat underrated figure in Italian cult cinema, is pretty extraordinary here – you can see why Sayer would be effectively and effortlessly seduced by her, and how she can manipulate him with a smile. As a sex film – which is certainly what this was in 1969 even if it would barely qualify as sexploitation today (though in many ways it’s now probably even more challengingly provocative than it was at the time of release) – Femina Ridens is impressively even-handed with its sexual objectification. While Lassander is frequently topless, so is Philippe Leroy as Sayer, who we often see as naked as the censors would allow at the time. Director Piero Schivazappa’s gaze is as fixated with his body as it is with hers; perhaps even more so. Given that Sayer is a physical narcissist, it makes perfect sense. But as with the narrative shift, the eroticised fascination with him makes any suggestion that this is a straight male fantasy seem laughable. This film consciously speaks to the female gaze even as it seduces the male audience with Lassander’s beauty and effortless sexuality.

It’s no surprise that the film was picked up for distribution in the States by Radley Metzger. It has the same sense of visual sophistication, teasing kink and self-aware provocation that drove his European films of the era, from Camille 2000 to Therese and Isabelle. Metzger knew both how to sell an erotic film as an upmarket experience and subvert the expectations of the traditional sex film audience while still delivering the goods. It’s no wonder that many people have, over the years, thought that Metzger had some involvement with the movie beyond distribution, especially as Schivazappa never did anything as remotely stylish as this again (his 1986 erotic drama La signora della notte, starring Serena Grandi, is worth a look but has none of the visual style or subversive intelligence of this).

A lot of Femina Ridens speaks to the male terror of emasculation. It’s the incel’s worst fears confirmed, a film in which women collude to seduce men and drain them of their vital energies, ending with Sayer quite literally consumed and stripped down to the bone by a giant female vagina in the form of a recreation of Niki de Saint Phalle’s 1966 Nanas sculpture – as potent a symbol of the power of female sexuality as any you’ll see on screen. Invariably, repressive and frightened censors have cut the film over the years, ostensibly to protect women from male violence – but if any film was designed to make men think twice about imposing their desires on unwilling women, this is it. Let’s not try to make this film out to be a heavy message movie. At its heart, it is a wild, kinky psychedelic trip that is awash with fetishistic imagery, playfully flirting with ideas of control and manipulation. But it still has enough provocative ideas to ensure that it will continue to unsettle and disturb those who want to control sexual freedom in general, and female sexual desire in particular in the name of saving women from themselves. Of course it has – that’s the entire idea behind the film after all, and those trigger points haven’t changed much in the 55 years since it was made.

DAVID FLINT

Femina Ridens has been re-released on Blu-ray – uncut and restored – by Shameless Films. Buy it here.

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