Unhappy Ending

Have you ever watched something which, quite unexpectedly, results in you feeling deeply disturbed and upset?  I had such an experience at the weekend and those feelings have haunted me ever since.  Going back to Saturday night, I thought I was settling down to watch just another Italian exploitation film I'd found on YouTube.  Sure, it was in Italian, which I don't speak, without any English subtitles but as it appeared to be some kind of 1970s sex comedy, I didn't think that would really matter.  Indeed, as To Be Twenty (as the title translates into English), unfolded it became obvious that this tale of two liberated young women hitch hiking through Italy wasn't too different from the kind of sex comedies and soft porn turned out in the UK during the seventies.  They regularly took their clothes off and had sex with various characters they met, (and each other, for that matter), every so often everything would stop as they danced to some pop tune or other.  A large part of the action seemed to be about their involvement with a commune, amongst whose members was none other seventies Italian exploitation idol Ray Lovelock, (his real name - his father was English apparently - rather than an Anglicised version of it). 

So far, so good.  It was all pretty much as I expected.  However, in the film's last ten to fifteen minutes, things take an unexpected and unpleasant turn.  The two girls find themselves in a dubious roadside café full of small town hicks and make the mistake of spurning the advances of what appears to be the local crime boss (unlike the other hicks, he wears a suit).  After leaving the café and hitting the road again, they quickly find themselves being pursued by the hicks from the café.  Chased into some woods, they are caught by the mob, gang-raped and brutally murdered.  Yes, that's right, what started as a light sex comedy and remained in that vein for most of its running time, culminates in our heroines being sexually assaulted and killed.  So unexpected was this development that it left me deeply shocked.  It was the equivalent of Confessions of a Window Cleaner culminating with Robin Askwith being dragged into a back alley by the husband or father of one of the women he'd bonked, bum raped relentlessly, beaten to death with a lump hammer, then having his body dumped in a skip as the end titles rolled with jaunty music playing over them. 

Clearly, it left a bad taste in the mouths of its original Italian audience, as the film didn't do too well at the domestic box office.  Not surprisingly, for its English language release, the film was severely re-edited, with the original beach opening cut, replaced with part of the closing sequence - the girls are seen being chased into the woods, before freeze-framing with the sounds of police sirens super-imposed, implying their rescue.  The film then picks up with them hitch-hiking (the second scene in the original cut) and ends with them similarly back on the road, hitching.  Quite what the intent of the film's makers was, with regard to the original cut, isn't clear.  I suspect they were trying to make a point about the continued patriarchal nature of Italian society, even in the supposedly liberated seventies, demonstrating that whilst young women might be able to get away with exercising their sexual liberation and freedom from outmoded social mores in the big city, the reality in more rural areas would be quite different.  There are those, of course, who will assume that the film is about women being put back in their 'proper' place for having the audacity to exercise their rights to freedom and equality, (judging by some of the comments I've seen online whilst researching the film, there are a disturbing number of such individuals out there).  But I don't think the point of the film was that they were 'asking for it'.  If it was, it failed miserably, as the appalling violence perpetrated against two innocent women at the end, just because they refused to acquiesce to male sexual domination, just left me sickened and disturbed.  I just wish I could get them out of my head.