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The Pleasure
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (19th August 2024). |
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The Film
 In between the wars, world-weary French citizen Gerard Villeneuve (Endgame's Gabriele Tinti) wanders the carnival in "pagan" Venice and is bewitched by Leonora (Sadomania's Isabella Andrea Guzon) who does not fall for his Casanova act but takes him to an opium den where they spiritually and physically consummate their relationship with the help of Haunani (Emanuelle Around the World's Laura Gemser). Their relationship continues beyond Leonora numerous affairs that excite his jealousy, her marriage and children, and her continuing to work in the high-class bordello of Rosa (Hatchet for the Honeymoon's Dagmar Lassander). When Leonora dies, Gerard is left with the guardianship of her son Edmund (Marco Mattioli) and daughter Ursula (also Guzon) whose resemblance to her mother he finds disturbing. Ursula is curious about her mother's secret life while repressed Edmund is given to histrionics over the subject and only comforted by suckling his sister's breast as he did his mother's. Gerard's housekeeper Fiorella (To Be Twenty's Lili Carati) eagerly takes over Edmund's care and his libido comes out in a penchant for erotic photography. Ursula, meanwhile, breaks into Gerard's study and discovers the photographic and tape-recorded memories of their love affair and tries to excite Gerard by reliving some of the more vivid episodes. When Gerard resists Ursula's overtures, she and Edmund break away from him and Fiorella to follow in Leonora's footsteps while Gerard's French citizenship and the reputation of his antifascist father make finding them through legal means difficult as Ursula is on the verge of auctioning off her virginity to high-ranking officers. As he moved up from cinematographer to cinematographer/producer/director, Joe D'Amato born Aristide Massaccesi which he usually kept for cinematography credits found international success in softcore erotic cinema in the seventies with the "Black Emanuelle" sequels, and further entries incorporated hardcore material in the form of body doubles and extras, leading to a commissioned quintet of hardcore productions shot on the island of Santo Domingo. His subsequent company from the eighties onward Filmirage an existing company bought from producer Ermanno Donati (The Horrible Dr. Hichcock) and co-owned with D'Amato by Donati's daughter Donatella (Emanuelle in Bangkok) was an attempt to branch out into the mainstream with the pseudo-slashers Anthropophagus and Absurd while keeping itself afloat with occasional efforts like Caligula: The Untold Story (released in hardcore and softcore versions), for-hire hardcore entries as "Alexander Borsky" and reediting existing footage with new hardcore inserts for the likes of Emanuelle's Perverse Outburst while branching out into the trendy post-apocalyptic and sword & sorcery genres and more horror with the financial interest of Trans World Entertainment's Edmund and Helen Sarlui. D'Amato's Filmirage entries in the softcore genre were inspired by the success of Tinto Brass' arthouse erotic film adaptation of the Jun'ichirτ Tanizaki novel The Key. Ostensibly based on a novel by Nicolas Restif de La Bretonne and scripted by Claudio Fragasso (Troll 2), The Pleasure is most thematically-linked to the film with the more underplayed Fascist elements one would barely know a war was going on in this Italian countryside and placid Venice the indirect communication of desires through photography and audio recordings in the place of the Brass film's diaries while the soft-focus, diffused, and powdery cinematography was already trademark D'Amato. Perhaps due to his experiences with the censors and prosecution over his hardcore works, D'Amato is not as explicitly daring as Brass was, and while Brass was able to continue getting more explicit in his subsequent works while not actually crossing over into hardcore, D'Amato's subsequent Filmirage softcore efforts were classy-looking but rather lukewarm although his duo Eleven Days, Eleven Nights and Top Model were hits on American cable along with a few stray efforts in their wake and by the time of Brass' more outrageous softcore theatrical efforts, D'Amato had returned to hardcore with more than fifty efforts in the last decade of his career before his death in 1999. Dramatically, the film is rather flat but the surroundings are attractive as is the dιcor and wardrobe. Maurice Poli (Papaya: Love Goddess Of The Cannibals) has an uncredited role as the estate's groomsman with whom Ursula tries to live out one of her mother's memories. D'Amato's follow-up The Alcove at least introduces some class hypocrisy and colonial racism into a similarly "intimate" period chamber drama; yet The Pleasure does seem to have been approached with more than aesthetic and financial interest on D'Amato's part compared to the subsequent softcore efforts. 
Video
The Pleasure was released theatrically in the United Kingdom or at least certified with the BBFC in 1985, and the running time suggests that it was the slightly-shorter and softer Italian version with the English dub track, and this is also presumably the version that Elephant Video put out on VHS with an 18-certificate. Redemption's 1995 VHS was presumably the longer English export version going by the running time. Presumably the 2005 Italian DVD featured the shorter Italian cut from the old video master since Avo Film's DVDs were rarely improvements over their eighties VHS releases although this may or may not have been one of the titles D'Amato removed footage for the censors and then re-inserted it for exhibition. The 2021 German DVD and 2023 German Blu-ray featured new transfers of the export version with the Italian track and a German dub synchronized to the image. 88 Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray presumably comes from the same 2K scan and presents both the export version (93:30) and the Italian version (90:43) on the same disc. The one obvious edit is the shortening of the first opium den sequence, removing some more indulgent views of silhouetted lovemaking between a woman and a man wearing an obvious strapped on appliance, while other edits may have been more for pacing and duration as other erotic sequences look largely the same. Both versions feature English opening and closing credits. While there is D'Amato's trademark diffused lighting and some smoke, grain is stable and not smeary like the SD remasters the licensor provided for some of their other catalog entries for DVD which often cropped to 1.66:1 OAR to 1.78:1 but the diffusion does make fine detail only truly evident in close-ups (in which it appears that Tinti was made-up to look younger during the flashbacks rather than older in the film proper and it is now obvious that most of the interiors in both the countryside and Venice use the same villa). Black levels are variable due to the on-camera filtering and diffusion of light sources, and there are some light leaks during the Venetian carnival scenes which it would probably not be right to call second unit as D'Amato likely shot them himself. 
Audio
The English version features an LPCM 2.0 mono track while the Italian version features an LPCM 2.0 mono track and optional English subtitles. Both are post-dubbed and the longer English version will likely be the viewing choice for repeat viewing. Dialogue is clear on both, sound effects and ambiance are sparse, while it becomes increasingly clear just how little music "Cluster" provided for the film with their repetitive use (Cluster does not appear to be a music library but may be a pseudonym for either Filmirage house composer Pietro Montari who was usually tasked with the erotic work or Carlo Maria Cordio who was usually given the horror but both crossed over occasionally). 
Extras
Extras start with "Clyde on Joe" (15:07) in which co-writer Fragasso recalls meeting many of the genre regulars working for editor Otello Colangeli, pitching them ideas as an aspiring writer, and realizing that genre efforts had their "dignity" if well-assembled. He met D'Amato through producer Franco Gaudenzi who produced several of the films he co-wrote and co-directed by Bruno Mattei throughout the eighties. He also discusses D'Amato's censorship issues and how when he directed films that required hardcore sequences he would give those scenes to cinematographer Luigi Ciccarese. He briefly discusses his most notorious Filmirage production Troll 2 before revealing that he worked on a number of other Filmirage titles supervising the dubbing in Rome. In "The Pleasure of It All" (29:01), film critic Franco Grattarola provides an overview of D'Amato's career moving in and out of erotica hardcore and softcore which also encompasses the rise of hardcore cinema in Italy and many of its major players including performers like Carati, Karin Schubert, and Paola Senatore who had fallen on hard times and posed for softcore layouts in men's magazines that then offered more money for softcore video and even more for hardcore shoots, exploiting their images by then recycling and reediting the material into other videos, as well as some of the eras stars like Marina Frajese, the wife of a popular broadcaster, and Ilona Staller aka Cicciolina who later successfully ran for Italian parliament, as well as Rocco Siffredi who starred in several of D'Amato's later hardcore films Grattarola makes the case that the Italian film industry was kept afloat by hardcore during the eighties and nineties financial and film funding crises.  In "Filmirage: Sex and/or Violence" (14:06), film historian Mike Foster provides an overview of D'Amato's output under the Filmirage banner in which the mix of sex and violence of D'Amato's earlier films was often separated out into different types of pictures, the influences of the likes of Zombie and The Evil Dead, noting the common players in front of and behind the camera, artistic highlights like Michele Soavi's Stagefright and financial ones like Eleven Days, Eleven Nights, as well as the last or penultimate offerings of veterans like Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi. "Budget Erotica" (11:57) is a visual essay by film historian Pier Maria Bocchi who distinguishes earlier Italian cinema erotic works as an outgrown of Commedia all'italiana, D'Amato's softcore and hardcore seventies films, and the Filmirage efforts as part of the eighties "artsy fartsy" pseudo-intellectual cycle spun-off of Brass' The Key that included works by veterans like Alberto Lattuada, Salvatore Samperi, and Gianfranco Mingozzi, Mauro Bolognini, as well as actor-turned-director Gabriele Lavia and his wife/muse Monica Guerritore. The disc also includes the Italian credits (2:34) which are sourced from a video master and cropped to 1.78:1, as well as the English export trailer (2:27). 
Packaging
The disc comes with a reversible cover featuring new artwork by Graham Humphreys and the original poster while the first pressing includes a double-walled, anti-scratch matte laminate O-ring slipcover and the booklet featuring "Houses of Tolerance, Joe D'Amato's The Pleasure, Sex and Prostitution in Italy" by Francesco Massaccesi (none of which were supplied for review).
Overall
D'Amato's softcore erotic follow-ups offer more of the same but The Pleasure does seem to have been approached with more than aesthetic and financial interest on D'Amato's part.
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