"The models are all full figured. Do you like thick women?"
“No. But you don’t always have the choice.”
“No. But you don’t always have the choice.”
The Story:
Blonde and beautiful Monika (Gloria Guida) isn’t just turning 16 in two weeks, she’s also turning the heads of every male in town. While she is popular at school, Monika can’t seem to find a suitor to match her intelligence nor handle her sexual restraint. Wanting her first time to be special and realizing her current boyfriend Leo (Gianluigi Chirizzi) is a pig who doesn’t respect her, she sets her sights on her teacher, Bruno (Andrés Resino), who represents everything she believes a man should be; honest, artistic and sweet. Lurking around every corner is a deplorable lawyer named Moroni (Paolo Carlini), who is friends with Monika’s family and has no qualms with paying the skeevy pimp Leo for sexual favors from the high school girls he beds. It seems the whole town sees Monika on top of their self-indulgent sexual sundae with infatuation fuelled by what’s between her legs instead of what’s in her heart.
The Review:
The Review:
A quarter century before Cruel Intentions and Reese Witherspoon, there was Monika and Gloria Guida. The twain share archetypal characters that pave a much seedier road than the almost gentile seeming teen comedies that most of us grew up on, exhibiting a darker, more uncomfortable side of sexploitation. Monika gets the attention of boys and men for good reason, she’s absolutely stunning for starters, bubbly, eager to learn and live. To the men she encounters, she is seen either as a triumph or a living photograph peering back to simpler days when the wife wasn’t such a nag. They live with the inability to love and have drifted so far beyond the boundaries of any moral code that they can’t even figure out the easiest way to her pants would be to show her proper affection. The men Monika encounters are attracted to her because she is everything they are not, leaving you with a greasy, sick feeling. She wants nothing but to be and they want nothing but to take from her what makes her shine. This, of which, has nothing to do with her virginity, but her carefree youth.
Even though Gloria Guida fills her bikini out too far to truly be a mere 15, the film is a catch-22 since the viewers are supposed to be eyeing the beauty up and down when she bares her very European (think Kate Winslet in The Reader) topless torso, yet condemns the actions of its male characters. Guilt is allegorical throughout and that same feeling is innocently passed on to the viewer. Like a casually demented sexual soap opera, teenage naivety is trounced upon in scene after scene and cemented when we learn that Moroni’s current wife was wed to him at just 16 and deeply regrets it, oftentimes branching out to others for sexual healing since she has no attraction to her own husband due to his disturbing, greed-motivated psyche. Although we don’t get to know Monika too well (her characterization amounts to the obvious reasons older men would be attracted to younger women; innocence, exuberance and the way she bounces in slo-mo on the beach), we hope this foreshadowing isn’t in the cards for the blonde cutie.
The ensuing relationship between Bruno and Monika is less afflicting than Moroni’s obsession, but still the dramatic portrayal of a salt-and-peppered man with such a young girl is odd to watch. If Louis Malle’s goal in Murmur of the Heart was to make incest a trivial point in the plot, director Mario Imperoli decidedly hammers home his subject matter to make the viewer uneasy. He doesn’t craft a fine film, but he manages to create a sluggish antithesis to the gender roles brought forth in The Graduate. We cheer on Dennis Hoffman to go for broke, but the feeling isn’t mutual with a female protagonist. Sexploitation grindhouse go-ers will likely love to include Monika in their collections; there is some great T&A, some genuine thought and lots of sleaze (can anyone top the Italians in this game?), but those with diminutive knowledge of Italian b-films should be ready for something a little more Cimmerian than usual. (Brett H.)
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