A woman (ravishing, but unsympathetic brunette Monica Guerritore) discovers her husband in bed with a much younger lady. Shocked and distraught, the woman dumps the adulterous bastard. The embittered woman embarks an road trip of erotic self discovery. She meets a goofball opera-singing cartoonist (Gabriele Lavia, who also wrote and directed this mess) during her sensual pilgrimage and has a torrid sexual affair with him. Sound pretty hot and interesting? Well, it just ain't. For starters, the meandering narrative gets bogged down in way too much dreary talk and plods along at a painfully sluggish clip. Moreover, the infrequent sweaty, yet passionless sex scenes fizzle instead of sizzle because the two central characters aren't remotely engaging or compelling (the woman is extremely cold, aloof, and hateful while the guy is too much of a passive wimp and hence unlikable). Worse yet, this pretentious borefest actually makes some fumbling and ill-advised attempts at depth and meaning with simply mind-numbing results. On the plus side, there's a hilariously bawdy animated sequence featuring cartoon male members, Giorgi Carmini's glossy cinematography gives this picture an impressively expansive look, and Luigi Ceccarelli's moody jazz score hits the spot. But overall this flick proves to be quite a laboriously blah chore to endure and thus overall rates as a real crummy wash-out.
Review of Scandalous Gilda
