(1969)
1.5
Mark Deming
Before he made a name for himself in big-budget kink with Salon Kitty and Caligula and went on to a career as Europe's most tush-obsessed sexploitation auteur, Tinto Brass fancied himself some sort of cinematic rebel, and if 1969's Nerosubianco seems more like a playful goof on counterculture sensibilities than a radical's call to arms, that doesn't make it any less of a product of its time (the late 1960s) and place (London, presumably still swinging). Nerosubianco doesn't have a plot so much as a notion that provides a framework as Brass leaps from one artfully designed but often mildly ridiculous set piece after another -- rock bands play in trees, a beauty salon is filled with women dressed as cows, hippies hand out Mao's "Little Red Book" (one is given a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in return) and hipsters gambol about stylized studio sets -- as a blasé wife from Italy (Anita Sanders) keeps crossing paths with a handsome black man from America (Terry Carter) and finds herself lost in sexual fantasies about him. Brass also punctuates the film with startling stock footage -- ranging from a brutal bullfight and newsreel images from Nazi death camps to the infamous eyeball-slicing scene from Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou -- and constantly cuts back to the less-than-remarkable British rock band Freedom as they slog through one heavy-handed number after another in various parts of the city. The film features very little dialogue and no sync sound, and Brass's touch is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. Still, the film moves along at an enthusiastic pace, the camerawork is crisp, the two leads (who barely function as characters) look good and play well off each other (especially in their periodic soft-core love scenes), and the whole exercise has a playful good humor about itself when it isn't busy Making A Statement (it's significant that the counterculture image Brass dotes on the most is the once-famous poster of Frank Zappa seated on the toilet). It's hard not to get the feeling Tinto Brass had no business making a film about hippies (or interracial romance) when he directed Nerosubianco, but he seemed to be having too much fun with his mildly misguided ideas about them to begrudge what he came up with, and as long as you're expecting a parade a entertaining images rather than a look at a world in flux, viewers should enjoy this as a guilty but satisfying pleasure. Incidentally, while the movie as been released on Region One DVD as Attraction, it was screened theatrically in America as Black On White and under the sublimely sleazy title The Artful Penetration Of Barbara.
Black on White on AllMovie
Black on White (1969)
