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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