Seduction (La Seduzione)
Italy, 1973
Director: Fernando Di Leo
Screenplay: Fernando Di Leo, Ercole Patti, Valentino Bompiani, Luisa Montagnana
Genre: Drama, erotic cinema
Soundtrack composer: Luis Bacalov
Editing: Amedeo Giomini
Production company: Daunia
Main actors:
Lisa Gastoni (Caterina)
Maurice Ronet (Giuseppe)
Jenny Tamburi (Graziella)
Graziella Galvani
Pino Caruso
Barbara Marzano (Rosina)
Rosario Bonaventura
Giorgio Dolfin
Luigi Antonio Guerra (Mimì)
Plot
The Sicilian Giuseppe Giuseppe returns to his native Catania after 15 years living in France. The main reason for his return is to meet again Caterina, his platonic love from his youth. The talkative and joking Alfredo, a womanizing jeweler, tells his compadre Giuseppe how things have changed in his circle of friends since his departure from Catania. Caterina is widowed and has a teenage daughter. Giuseppe asks Alfredo to arrange an opportunity to “casually” meet Caterina. So, at a social event, Giuseppe is reunited with the woman that, despite all those years away, he has not been able to forget.
Initially, Caterina tries to keep her manners for the sake of “what people will say”, since she is not a “liberal Frenchwoman” but “a Sicilian lady”. But soon she too will be carried away by the strong attraction she feels for the gentlemanly “man of the world” who has just returned from France. Everything indicates that in the past, the relationship between the two was more than platonic?
Graziella is Caterina’s fifteen-year-old daughter. From the very beginning, the young girl is very affectionate towards her mother’s friend.
Alfredo knows a lot about women, or at least that’s what he wants everyone to believe (despite his playboy pretensions, he is always rejected by Luisa, a rather light-hearted mature woman who is a close friend of Caterina’s). On one occasion, Alfredo warns Giuseppe to “be careful” with his sweetheart’s daughter, insinuating that the tender and sweet young girl is really “in the mood”. Giuseppe reacts indignantly to these unfounded accusations.
When, the first time he sleeps over at Caterina’s house, Giuseppe is about to go to the bathroom during the night, he passes in front of Graziella’s room. The door is open, and the desirable girl lies on the bed completely naked… (pretending to sleep, and that the sheet has “fallen off”).
In the following days, the flirtatious Graziella provokes her “stepfather” in a less and less subtle way. Sitting on the sofa in Caterina’s absence, the girl “absent-mindedly” puts her legs on Giuseppe’s, while pretending to read a magazine, getting closer and closer to him… The latter, at first a bit intimidated, begins to caress her. Graziella, who enjoys the situation, continues to bring her buttocks closer… until the mother returns home. Then the two separate abruptly and dissemble, before Caterina enters the room.
Gradually, the enormous and passionate erotic interest that Giuseppe felt towards Caterina diminishes, to be gradually directed towards the daughter (who is probably the age Caterina was when he fell in love with her in her youth). Giuseppe still loves the forty-something “Sicilian lady”, but the spicy teenager is sexually much more exciting…
As his friend Alfredo has already warned him, a ménage a trois with mother and daughter is something that can have dire consequences for Giuseppe, a serious man with a well-furnished head.
One night when he sleeps over with Caterina, Giuseppe sneaks out of the bed where he has slept with her, and taking advantage of the fact that she is asleep, he goes to the next room: Graziella’s. There, the naughty young woman is already waiting for him. There the naughty young woman was already waiting for him, naked and radiant. Giuseppe trusts that Caterina’s sleep will be deep, and that she will not get up from the bed when she notices his absence…
Comment
“During all those years I spent away, in all the women I was with, I only saw you” the enamored Giuseppe, recently returned from France, would once confess to Caterina. And he was certainly sincere. Later, in the beautiful and provocative Graziella, Giuseppe certainly saw her mother too (although a few years younger!).
We are, saving the distances, in front of an Italian version of the famous story of “Lolita”. In fact, this film is inspired by a novel with a plot very similar to the one written by Nabokov: “Graziella” (1970), by the Sicilian author Ercole Patti. The great Fernando Di Leo (“Milano calibro 9”, 1972) adapted the book to the big screen.
French actor Maurice Ronet plays Giuseppe, and the “fifteen-year-old” Graziella is played by Jenny Tamburi, an actress who was already 21 years old at the time of filming. More or less contemporary of Gloria Guida and Lilli Carati, the late Jenny Tamburi participated like them in numerous softcore products throughout the seventies.
The very good music of the film is provided by the Argentine Luis Bacalov, composer also of the soundtracks of “Milano Calibro 9” (1972) and “Il Boss” (1973); both also by Fernando Di Leo.
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