If you've never seen a Tinto Brass movie, this is not a good place to start. Tinto is at his best when he's not taking himself seriously, and in Monamour he attempts some sort of depth that he just can't pull off. What's worse, the plot feels like a recycled version of one of his better films - 1992's Cosi fan Tutte - but with all the wrong choices made; Cosi fan Tutte was light-hearted and featured a strong female lead in Claudia Koll, who was in charge of her own fate the whole time; the lead in Monamour is a despicable and unlikable character who succumbs to the will of men around her. While the two characters end up having similar journeys, the viewer just can't forgive Monamour's Marta as he did Diana from Cosi fon tutte. And the fact that the movie takes itself so seriously makes the erotica disturbing and off-putting, unlike the playfulness in Cosi fon Tutte.

Monamour has good cinematography and some well-shot sex scenes which are both a given with Tinto, but the sex is more disturbing than it is enticing. While Cosi fon Tutte was almost feminist (sort of) and is lots of fun for a couple to watch together, Monamour feels more like a horny old man's fantasy, and it just doesn't work.

Just as the British have a lock on double entendre dialogue and presenting really dirty sexual situations with a dollop of humour which makes the whole thing funny and not the least offensive, I found this film with its explicit sex (everything except penetration) a light-hearted, humorous and altogether engaging bedroom romp. Sure some of the shots are almost medical in their precision and you'd better like butt shots because they abound but the whole thing is so lightweight, so non-serious that it's almost an escapist film. Sexy as hell but not pornographic.

This film occupies a kind of no man's land between erotic comedies and straight pornography, only instead of shell craters, barbed wire, and corpses this particular no man's land is a demented milieu of luxurious beds, Rabalasian frescoes, and prosthetic penises. At least I think they're prosthetic. I certainly hope so. One of them resembles something that should be found on a horse, or maybe an elephant.

The plot, what there is of it, is unremarkable. A young woman has been married for only six months to her publisher husband and already she's bored with his love making, so she seeks stimulation elsewhere -- in literature, in fantasies, in memories, and finally in the person of Leon, a tattooed French guy who turns out to be rough but satisfying trade.

The young blond is Anna Jimskaia. (Nobody else's name matters.) She's the kind of caricature of desirable pulchritude that Anita Ekberg parodied in "La Dolce Vita." She's attractive, but in an entirely conventional way, no quirks, no individuality. And she's hefty all over. She doesn't merely walk. She minces and jiggles and bounces and sways her hips from side to side in a way that no man could possibly imitate.

It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that she has her clothes off as often as she has them on, so that we get to know pretty much every pore on her flamboyant body on a first-name basis.

The movie isn't worth going on about but, let me see, there are scenes of not only nudity, but urination, douching over a bidet, frottage, cunnilingus, fellatio, anal intercourse, regular intercourse, threesomes, lesbianism, and -- I'm trying to remember. No, there were no animals.

I guess this satisfies Tinto Brass's fantasies or, more likely, he believes he's found a winning formula for making movies and money at the same time. I can't really recommend it with any enthusiasm because it's not my fantasies, which run more along the lines of giant tubs of Allegro marinade and upright alligators doing grotesque gavottes.

Not that there's anything wrong with the fundamental template that the plot fills in. There can't be TOO much wrong with it since it's formed the basis of about ten million pornographic novels and movies. Bored wife lets stranger boff her in a toilet during a literary ball. Right. It happens to me all the time. But it can be done sloppily, as here, or done with a bit of pith and a touch of poetry, as in "Belle de Jour."