User Reviews

The following review contains several spoilers:

Avere vent'anni or To Be Twenty is a story about two twenty year old women who meet up on beach and instantly have things in common and inevitably become friends.

Tina who is the feisty and rebellious one and Lia who is more sensible and innocent. The two ladies want to have fun and enjoy life so are looking for liberation and after stealing some food from a local supermarket go on to find a commune for shelter. Whilst they are there all the men apart from the owner appear to be stoned and not capable of doing much especially when the owner says to the girls they can stay there rent free if they sleep with the men. The only other woman at the commune is finding it a struggle to look after three babies.

Tina and Lia decide they don't want to have to sell themselves in order to stay at the commune and instead decide to sell encyclopedias for the owner in order to continue staying there. They encounter a few strange people with Lia having another young woman who is lesbian makes advances towards her.

Things change at the commune when a film crew arrive and want to do a documentary on the people living there, only Tina and Lia talk to them and then we get to find out more about their backgrounds which were not pleasant as they grew up. Then they get mixed up within police corruption and the commune is searched for drugs from an apparent tip off which results in the girls being deported.

There are two versions of this film with the longest running for around 94 minutes, in it's uncut form this is the version you should see which may have English subtitles.

I wont give away the last fifteen minutes of the film although what started off as a comedy/drama film with some nudity and a pop soundtrack which reflects on the different stages in the women's journeys transcends into a much more debatable topic of what i would class as a thriller of not only how women are represented but also how men can treat them and the consequences of peoples actions.

Yes after watching the full version of this film people will compare it to several other exploitation films made around its time period although with this one it has three things that make an immediate impact. 1) The women come across as likable characters 2)The justice system in general 3)You can't always have authority or power and retain it.

For me it had one of the most memorable endings i have ever seen which i would never forget and if the director set out to achieve the maximum impact then i think he did it successfully.

I would rate this film 6 out of 10.

...if it had a better storyline. Avere vent'anni (or "2b20") has a cult movie status. Until it was released in DVD few years ago with much claim and wawings by the cinema of genres lover. Originally released in 1978 2b20 was a complete failure and the producer forced the director Di Leo to change the final ending. But this resulted in nothing and the movie fell in forgotten unless for the lesbian scene between Gloria Guida and Lilli Carati, the most beautiful and sexy actresses of the Italian cinema in the 70's, both retired for good, the first as the wife of ultra famous Italian ecletic showman Johnny Dorelli, the second victim of terrible personal issues. I believe Di Leo wanted to show how the decadent society kills the young spirits like raping them. The sense of the final scene is that there is no space for the freewill and the spirit is killed by the dusty tradition. As usual Fernando Di Leo uses the women body to criticize the male stupidity, insecurity. But the dark mood of the end of the movie have nothing to share with the comedy of the whole movie. In this movie the main characters of the two girls make no sympathy to the audience but their brutal death will make u sad. Anyways they are no heroes for the director. It seems that all the society and all the people are not worth a cent, not even the two girls, they die as they were only a minority. It is very difficult to find a focal point in the movie. There is simply not storyline, the events have no importance in the whole movie. The director seems riding the line between an intellectual protest to the society (that the counterculture was a total failure) and a commercial sexy movie. Probably a major disappointment for the director himself this is a movie nice to see by the comedy side. Lot of nice jokes, good direction, scenes that makes sense on their own. Unfortunately there is no consequentiality hence the spectator has no sense of time. It looks like a telefilm, made of episodes, with the same characters, but with different subjects. The final dark ending, the rape, is demonstrating that the same Di Leo didn't even know if this was an intellectual research on the failure of counterculture and all kind of human cultures, or just a show of the beautiful bodies of the two actresses to the audience, who were the top at the moment. Again the big regret is the total lack of a storyline. This is not new in Di Leo's movie; especially in the poliziesco genre the storyline is usual simple and easy, like the sentiment of human beings and in fact he's more interested in characters psychology. But in Avere Vent'Anni he is not able to give credibility to the events, the time is not stressed in any way, and the action is episodic. Despite this Di Leo doesn't loose a pinch of his screenplay writer genius. The characters speak common language, not a Shakespearean litany, he puts words that sound real. The directing is perfect, also in this minor movie you can appreciate how good was the Italian director. The Actors: it seems that the director shaped the personality of the two main characters on the two girls. Guida and Carati pierce the screen, they have a beautiful photogenic face, but they are not good actress at all, and need to be dubbed. While the character of Carati is a though leading spirit, the one of Guida is humble, silent. I don't know if this is due to the real capability of the two actresses, I've seen many movies and they provide the same expressions of this films. The character try to live their life at the limit, to be real humans that take decision, but the two actresses are not able to give a better impression than being an inflating doll, and the idea of the free girls of the director is totally reversed by their poor acting! Some kind of importance has the character played by Ray Lovelock, who is an ex teacher disappointed by the culture and the society who turned a junkie. Vittorio Caprioli is "il Nazariota", the Sai Baba wannabe, the chief of the commune. He's old, fat, and a little dumb, and looks always concerned of the economic part of the commune, and never about the spiritual. He witnesses the end of counterculture, and the decadence of those principles that made dream the young guys in early 70's. Caprioli is a fetish actor of Di Leo, and he doesn't disappoint. Funny and great as ever. The real good surprise is made by the comedian Giorgio Bracardi, especially famous in his surreal radio performances. Well Bracardi is over the top here and plays the part of the police officer who will send back home the two girls. It's incredible. He is serious, but he can be funny, grotesque is the right word. His facial expressions are exaggerated and this is the funny thing in it. He's so real in the stereotype of the police officer, that he becomes funny.

This is an average movie. Nice to see and easy to forget about it. Di Leo has done some pictures with no time, real masterpieces fortunately rediscovered by the wise men at the beginning of this century. But Avere vent'anni is definitely not one of them. The movie was low budget and not well orchestrated like the other ones. The Di Leo style is present, but I rate 2b20 as one of his minor films.

It's so strange how we find movies today.

There's a copy of To Be Twenty that's on Films & Clips, a YouTube channel that has lots of hard to find Italian movies. And if you watch that one, well, you may think that this is a fun loving comedy. And I'm here to sadly inform you that while that's the movie I wish this was, it is certainly not the movie that it is.

That's because the original version -- the one that the director, Fernando Di Leo preferred -- is 98 minutes long and the first 90 minutes will not prepare you for the last eight. The version that was cut and played in theaters after that one failed -- and was dubbed for America -- is 85 minutes and all sexual hijinks and fun.

Lia (Gloria Guida, who went from Miss Teenage Italia 1974 to starring in commedia sexy all'italiana films like Monika and La minorenne; she's also in Bollenti spiriti and La casa stregata) and Tina (Lilli Carati, the runner-up of Miss Italia 1975; she's in four Joe D'Amato movies -- La Alcova, Christina, The Pleasure and A Lustful Mind -- and acted in adult films in the late 80s and was also addicted to cocaine and heroin. She retired from public life in 1990 but returned to acting to play an occultist in Violent ****: The Movie, which was dedicated to her as she died before it was released). They're two young and, frankly, gorgeous women who decide to hitchhike to Rome and experience the world of free love.

As the girls say, We're young, we're beautiful, and we're pissed off." That takes them to a commune where they hope to find the pleasure that they've heard of and the leader, Nazariota (Vittorio Caprioli), allows them to stay as long as they sleep with the members. It sounds exactly like what they want, but every man in the place is either asleep, high, smells or a combination thereof. Tina does finally find Rico (Ray Lovelock) while we get to know the other members, who include a clown called Arguinas (Leopoldo Mastelloni) who has been meditating for three months and a single mother of three named Patrizia (Daniela Doria).

This episodic movie finds our two heroines taking part in a documentary where Lia shares how she grew up in a church orphanage and Tina reveals that her rich parents only cared about keeping her pure, which caused her to rebel. They also sell encyclopedias which leads them to meet all manner or strange people, all before the cops bust the commune -- Arguinas is even accused of being in the CIA -- and the ladies are told if they don't go back home by dark, they will be arrested.

Now, depending on the cut you watch, that's the movie. Unless you want to see the director's cut. And if you care about the girls, you won't.

On their way home, they stop to eat and dance while a jukebox plays. Several men take notice and follow them outside and take their turns assaulting them, beating them and leaving them for dead. The movie closes on their nude and destroyed bodies.

I mean, this is a sex comedy that also has readings from the Skum Manifesto and hippies portrayed as morons around ten years after their shelf date. But Di Leo drops the floor out from under you as until now, this has all been played as a humorous sex film. You are unprepared for what happens and I don't think he was trying to make a point about the way men treat women. It feels like he's punishing Lia and Tina for using their bodies and enjoy all the sex they've had.

At once, it's a movie with goofy dialogue like "As you already know, all the ideologies and religions man has invented over the centuries have all failed. But it finally reached this unbearable level when Christianity, Marxism and psychoanalysis created general and personal conditions that are conducive to schizophrenia" and an ending that feels like a snuff film.

The director also made Blood And Diamonds, Naked Violence, Slaughter Hotel, Caliber 9, Madness -- it's all making sense now -- and Naked Violence. I wish that I had just stuck to the America cut, but sometime we need to expose ourself to things and learn from them. I wish this was a message movie, like I said, but I think it's a message I don't agree with.

WARNING: MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS! Gloria Guida was Miss Teenager in Italy in 1971 before she went on to specialize in frothy sex comedies or sleazy dramas, and preens, pouts and plots her way through her roles like a continental Linda Hayden. In 1975 alone she was in over 7 films, including two more for prolific director Silvio Amadio, best remembered for the ultraviolent giallo Amuck (1973) with Barbara Bouchet and Farley Granger. But Euro-sleaze fans tend to agree her best role was in To Be Twenty (1977), a seedy piece of nihilism from director Fernando Di Leo.

In the original Italian version Guida and a fellow hitchhiked leave the liberated confines of a hippie commune and end up raped and murdered in the woods; in our English language version the film begins with the girls running through the woods pursued by would-be rapists, then stops abruptly with a freeze frame and the sounds of police sirens to the rescue. Next shot is the girls back on the highway, meeting the hippie commune leader (a nutty German who calls himself 'Shining Ray') they later bunk down with while cruising Rome looking for action.

Guida generates an amount of sympathy for her character and proves herself to be more than just eye candy; I'm sure this makes her demise in the original Euro version all the more shocking. As for Guida herself, not much was seen of her after the late 70s, and in To Be Twenty it appears high living was taking a toll on her Miss Teenager features. Fortunately for her and her friend they both survive their Rome vacation and are last seen hitting the open road, in what must be one of the weirdest re-edits in the history of exploitation.

A pair of free-spirited European girls played by Gloria Guida and Lili Carati hitch-hike to Rome in search of a commune where they can revel in the peace,free sexual love and happiness of the late 1960s. Instead they fall prey to bad vibes and unspeakable sexual violence.Fernando Di Leo's shocking tale is a coming-of-age tragedy laced with drugs,prostitution,sleaze and brutality.The film plays like a cheerful Italian sex comedy with some decent humor and plenty of nudity.However it all climaxes into unflinchingly brutal finale in the woods,where both girls are beaten,raped and murdered.The last sequence is truly ugly and disturbing in its cold depiction of sexual violence.It surely is unforgettable.8 out of 10.

There are two versions of this film by di leo,a good reliable italian director of usually hard boiled detective films,. The american one has the ending toned down and some sex secenes shortened,the lesbian scenes between Carati and Guida is missing.The opening scene in the italian version has full frontals,missing from the american version.

But the big difference is the ending,in the italian version it comes out of the blue.Its nasty vicious and never ever to be forgotten. So you have been warned.THat scene where the camera pulls away from the violated dead naked bodies in the woods,never to be forgotten