Thursday, April 15, 2021

The Nude Princess (Cesare Canavari, 1976)

 

The title character in Cesare Canavari’s The Nude Princess, Miriam, is a lawyer and former nude model (a duality which well sums up the film’s dominant mindset) who comes to Milan to negotiate construction contracts on behalf of her emerging African nation, and Canavari does affect some critical interest in the condescending and exploitative mindset of former colonial powers, portrayed here as certain they can negotiate rings around her (to the extent their thoughts are anything other than lewd ones). For all her impact on those around her, Miriam regards herself as “dead inside,” which she attributes mainly to a sexually traumatic past incident negotiated by the nation’s dictator, who regards her as his slave. Over the course of the film, various forces intervene to push her toward reawakening, which we can take in some general way to stand in for the broader evolution of African consciousness. However, such concerns sit strangely in a film of such lascivious instincts, one which seems primarily occupied by ensuring a regular supply of female nudity, a project executed with varying degrees of finesse: the film feels almost afraid of its own privileging of a powerful black woman (one played by a transsexual yet) and constantly drawn to self-sabotage, by insisting that she’s just another prisoner of quivering biology, her problems ultimately nothing that couldn’t be cured by the right man. Likewise, the appropriation of African culture oscillates between seeming admiring and engaged and just being reductively offensive. Despite everything though, it’s hard not to have some affection toward a film which thinks to cast the alluring and very European Tina Aumont as an American industrial espionage expert called “Gladys Fogget,” or in which we’re led to understand that wild, mind-altering tribal dances around a fire can apparently take place on an upper floor of a downtown Milanese building.

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