The Sex Machine (1975)

An Italian science fiction sex satire, The Sex Machine (1975), while never quite managing to balance its various elements satisfactorily, is nevertheless an entertaining watch.  It's premise is simple, but intriguing: by 2037 fossil fuels have been exhausted and the world is reverting to a pre-industrial society, with horses and carriages replacing cars, buses and trains, candles electric lights and carrier pigeons telephones, as scientists search for new forms of energy, Professor Enrico Coppola (Gigi Proietti) hits upon the idea of using the energy released by sex to set the world back in motion.  He starts off modestly, with the stroking of the erogenous zones of a female assistant generating a few volts.  Reasoning that more 'friction' is required, he succeeds in lighting a bulb with the energy released by two more of his assistants having sex.  Reasoning that, to generate a larger charge, he needs participants who are more energetic and skilled in their love making, he gets access to police and medical records to identify likely candidates, settling on an oversexed hotel manager and a housewife (who also turns out to be the wife of a rival scientist) with similar sexual appetites.  He and his assistants then contrive to have both admitted as patients in the hospital in which the professor is based by running both down with a horse drawn ambulance, causing minor injuries.  Placing both in the same room, they wait for nature to take its course - when it does, the result is an entire chandelier lighting up.  The professor's plans now become more grandiose, as he schemes to light up the entire street, which requires the unsuspecting couple to make love ten times in quick succession.

The streetlight incident brings Coppola's experiments to the attention of the authorities, who are sceptical and want further demonstrations.  At which point the plot settles back into a series of contrivances as they first have to get their Guinea Pigs back together (still unaware that they are being used in an experiment) and overcome the objections of the Vatican to a scheme to promote sex as a solution to the energy crisis.  Various interventions of the spouses of the two subjects complicate matters, preventing all but a single successful demonstration at the hospital, but the authorities want a larger, real world, demonstration.  So the professor and his assistants engage in more machinations (aided by the authorities) to bring the woman and the hotel manager together in a room at his hotel, where their sexual activity is able to reactivate the lifts for a few minutes.  Unfortunately, the intervention of the manager's wife leaves an elderly government official trapped in a lift and the professor's female assistant has to be deployed to seduce the manager to produce sufficient energy to rescue him.  Whilst amusing, all of these plot convolutions and contrivances are ultimately the film's biggest weakness.  Whilst such an incident filled plot, packed with misunderstandings, sexual frustration, coincidence and the like is pretty much the norm for the sex comedy genre, here it ultimately distracts from the film's satirical elements which, it feels, were its entire raison d'etre.

These satirical elements are squeezed into the film's latter half, after all the lengthy farcical sex scenes, feeling rather underdeveloped and hurried, as a result.  They are possibly best integrated into the main action in the lengthy sequence when Coppola demonstrates to the authorities that his discovery could be used on a larger scale, when the hotel is filled with sexually active guests, with every room wired up to transmit their sexual energies.  Various assistants report back to Coppola in the kitchens as to what is going on in each room and how much electricity is being generated by each sexual act, which he gleefully shares with the Monsignor who is representing the Vatican, sitting next to him.  The latter's expressions of disgust, despair, anguish and utter mortification as the professor tells him how much energy is variously released by anal sex, missionary position, masturbation, gang bangs and the like are alone worth watching the film for.  Later, when it is decided to try and deploy sex energy on a wider scale, the Monsignor is forced to agree that, for the greater good of Italy, if not the world, the church will have to start promoting sexual promiscuity, masturbation, homosexuality and any other form of sexual activity that can be thought of - as the professor reassures him, they'll still have six deadly sins left to scold people over and they could always hold a conclave to come up with a new seventh sin to replace sex.  

While the hypocrisy of the church is explored at some length - and quite effectively - in this second half of The Sex Machine,  (the Vatican is able to justify its volte face by the revelation that generating electricity from sex is most effective when it is simply a physical act, without love, thereby not compromising the sacred and God given gift of true love), its other main, but related, satirical point is less well served.  In the film's final act, after the technological world has been restored thanks to the conversion of sexual energy to electricity, resulting in Coppola being awarded the Nobel prize, it is found that, without the old taboos around unbridled sexual activity, people's sexual activity has peaked and is now in decline, as people start to seek something more: love, romance, companionship, deeper relationships not just based on the physical act of sex.  The proposed solution is to make love a taboo, with church now being urged to stigmatise it in the same way it had previously done with sex.  But, as the professor notes, when sex was taboo, people thought of nothing but breaking the taboo, but when it was encouraged as a necessity, becoming freely available, they began to lose interest - making love taboo would likely have the same effect on romance, suddenly making it more desirable and preferable to straightforward sex.   

Although feeling slightly shoe horned into the more straightforward sex comedy elements, it is these satirical elements which help lift the film into something more than just a regular sex movie.  Indeed, the film was clearly intended as a more mainstream entertainment, giving the impression of being made on a much higher budget than the average sex comedy.  Consequently, the production values are excellent, with the post-oil world vividly realised, with the streets lined with rusting cars and crowds going to airports at weekends to marvel at the now near-mythical flying machines, now sitting. lifeless, on the runways.  People's attempts to cling to the past are amusingly parodied with characters who still maintain their cars and pretend to drive them, providing, like children, their own engine sounds, or families still going through the ritual of gathering around the TV every evening and staring at a blank screen.  That said, the low tech world it portrays doesn't entirely make sense: such a collapse of technology would surely push the world, pretty quickly, into an agrarian based economy, not to mention resulting in a far more extensive collapse of central authority is portrayed.  But, hey, The Sex Machine isn't looking to be a post apocalyptic science fiction film, but rather a sexy satire and it tailors its vision of the future to meet the requirements of its plot.  The 'science' of the professor's plans is, interestingly, also something of a satire, taking the theories of Wilhelm Reich - who believed that sexual energy could be captured and stored.  (Indeed, Reich and his theories are name checked several times in the course of the movie).

Even though it is far from perfect, The Sex Machine is actually a very well made and enjoyable film, looking good and directed at a reasonable pace by Pasquale Festa Campanile (who adapted it from his own novel of the same name).   It does, though, get rather bogged down at some points by its straight  sex comedy elements,which become increasingly farcical and repetitive as the film progresses, ultimately becoming detrimental to the satirical elements.  That said, the sex comedy angle was doubtless  the film's main selling point when it came to getting it financed and distributed and, inevitably, would have been the main attraction for audiences.  Certainly, the film provides a constant stream of very attractive Italian ladies taking their clothes off and cavorting around naked, (these include Agostina Belli, Eleonora Giorgi and Monica Strebel), which isn't to be complained about.  There's also plenty of comedic schtick, most of which, being sex-based, translates easily into English, without losing much of the humour.   But, while The Sex Machine can be enjoyed purely on the level of a sex comedy, (albeit an uncommonly well made one), comparable to contemporary British films of the genre in terms of content and humour, it shouldn't simply be dismissed by wider audiences as just another Italian 'sexy comedy'.  The satirical elements, along with some effective acting performances and characterisations, do add a level of sophistication and intelligence not usually seen in the genre.  (The version I saw was the original Italian release with English sub-titles - there was also a dubbed English-language version which ran much shorter, probably cutting out much of the satire, which would account for the film's perception in the English-speaking world as being simply another crude and frantic sex comedy).