There have been some decent and even thoughtful movies made about hookers -- "Belle de Jour", "Never on Sunday," "Scandal," for instance -- but this isn't one of them. The screen is filled with bouncing breasts, all of them the size and shape of watermelons, hefty behinds, and hirsute pundenda, male as well as female. Only the close ups have been eliminated to protect the guilty.

Debora Caprioglio is Paprika, a hooker in modern Italy with the face of an adolescent and the body of a female specimen of Homo sapiens that has brought the concept of reproduction and nurturance to its finest degree, divine in its generosity. Here she is, with her cute little innocent face and chirrupy voice, starting out in a Roman whorehouse inhabited by cheerfully naked girls, and with walls straight out of the red light district of Pompeii. This isn't hard-core pornography but it gets just as boring just as quickly.

Paprika is coopted by a pimp who mistreats her. It's no tragedy though. She's a sassy babe and gives as good as she gets. There's not a sad moment in the film, or an enlightening one. She falls for a sailor but before the affair can develop he's off to sea, promising he'll return.

He does in fact return at the end of the movie and by this time Paprika has married an elderly Count who drops dead at once, enabling Paprika to buy her sailor the cruise boat he's always wanted.

The intent of the director, Tinto Brass, seems not to merely entertain the audience, because this is anything other than entertaining, but to keep the viewer agape in his seat at the vulgarity.

An example? An attractive and likable whore is on her death bed in the brothel. A crowd has gathered around the dying woman and someone calls for a doctor. He emerges from the crowd in his underwear and claims it's too late to help her. "I want a priest," she croaks. A priest in black underwear, wearing a crucifix around his neck, pushes his way out of the crowd and takes her confession. The moribund young woman is completely naked and uncovered on the bed, her legs spread apart. And the director places the camera between her feet an shoots upward so that the wiry curls of her pubic symphisis in prominently featured in the shot. What is the point?

A poem by Oscar Williams we read in high school drifted into my consciousness.

"What lewd, naked and revolting shape is this? A frozen oxtail in the butcher's shop. Long and lifeless upon the huge block of wood On which the ogre's ax begins chop chop."

In the end, Paprika and a friend sit on a balcony and watch the sailor's cruise boat puffing along a river or lake, enjoying themselves no end. The camera drifts over and fixes on the cold, unyielding, marmorial glutes of a nude statue -- and stays there while the end credits roll. It's a fitting conclusion.

Highly atypical of Brass' movies, this one is a potpourri of whorehouse scenes, loosely connected.(His best movies are, on the contrary, quite unified pictures in the shape of a bourgeois or rural drama/sex satire, and rather _intimist also, exploiting the sense of intimacy, secret, privacy unveiled ,etc..)This one is more like a whorehouse almanac, with some camp Fellinian dizziness and cold vertigo. On the other hand, it represents well Brass' gynecological approach, and Mme. Caprioglio's exposed genitalia are intensely fondled a couple of times during some medical exams. PAPRIKA might also be conspicuous for a note of meanness that supplements the shameless cynicism characteristic of Brass' products. Here there is a certain meanness and aggressiveness in the satire. The paradox is the obvious injustice done to Mme. Caprioglio's breasts—while everybody in the film—her chiefs in the brothel, her uncle, etc.—keep praising, touching, fondling her considerable ass, as the most exciting part of her body, it is nonetheless very evident that this place belongs to her tits. Her most extraordinary endowment, and especially at such young an age, are her tits. No one mentions them in the movie, and barely touches them ….

Mme. Caprioglio illustrates Brass' view of the colossally exciting woman—like Grandi,like Vassilissa, like Koll ….Brass exalts women whose sexuality and appeal are over-explicit and very tangible.

Since I was 15, Deborah is on my list of favorite soft—core actresses (with Grandi, Miti, Sandrelli, Tweed, and,more newly, Sinclair—the Hungarian one).Can you believe that no one in PAPRIKA praises her tits or at least notices their size, appeal, etc.? PAPRIKA is an brothel album comprising several shameless, sulfurous ,even angry, nihilist aqua-fortes. Brass pretends it wanted it a joyful celebration, a cheerful feast.But the movie looks sometimes angry and mean,as I said.It has not the enormous beauty to be found in LA CHIAVE or MIRANDA.

Brass was usually keen in filming the masculine answer, the erection, the natural masculine reaction to physical feminine beauty.

The movie does have a plot that traces the adventures of a young prostitute. But do people really watch and rewatch this movie for its plot? I doubt it very much! The main reason to watch this movie is young Deborah Caprioglio, photographed from every angle at the peak of her voluptuous beauty. She is breathtakingly beautiful, and Tinto Brass's light-hearted eroticism found its most memorable protagonist. The actress continues to make movies, but nothing measures up to the visual impact of this film.