What are you getting for your friends and family this year? The holiday season is upon us, so while you’re looking for the best gifts to buy, YouTube is offering a gift for everyone. But hopefully it will survive as a controversial cult classic for those of us with a taste for the weird, and a reminder of better times when the sight of a naked child did not automatically lead to mass hysteria from the self-righteous moral brigade across the pond. There also seem to be one or two non-sequiturs in the narrative flow, which may suggest some hasty editing (some sources give the original film length as 117 or 127 minutes, whereas the "uncut" version generally in circulation today only runs to around 91 minutes). The ending is daft for one, the dog pretty pointless for another (when it's around, which is not much). Flaws: yes, plenty of course, it's no masterpiece. Ban it? Never! You don't have to watch it and neither do I, but I am strangely attracted by its power and sheer oddity. It obviously sickens the prudish, and although I can understand why, that actually contributes to its appeal for me.
So yes, it's uncomfortable and challenging viewing, on many levels, and on these terms the film is undoubtedly successful. But sorry, righteous Christians and outraged moralists, I don't reckon I'll burn in hell for watching and enjoying it, and I'd far rather live in a society that permits eccentricities like this than your prurient paradise. That's my take on it, from my English standpoint. There's nothing wrong with nudity, yes even child nudity, and nothing wrong with sex but combine the two and you cross the line at some point, and I think this film does, even though it's tastefully done and certainly not what I'd call child porn. I just recoil a little from seeing so much young flesh in such sexual situations. Kids really do behave like that (you deny it at your peril) and a shiver went down my spine as I recalled my own youth - so the film worked in this way for me. This is clearly deliberate, yet the shock value is compounded by the sex scenes - also intentional of course, but necessary to the whole? Sex is clearly integral to the power games being played out by the kids, and again this is a convincing aspect of the plot as a whole. The film is shocking in its portrayal of children's cruelty, more so than any other I can think of, even Lord of the Flies. The locations are stunning and the three young actors are quite beautiful, highlighting all the more the psychological and physical torture they inflict on each other, which is achingly well portrayed and well acted. The controversy over its content, which has made it so notorious (and which attracted my attention in the first place, and no doubt many others'), will rage forever, but beyond all that it's a pretty convincing study of adolescent torment and suffering.
So what we have is a curiosity from another age, and it's really rather good. However in the case of Maladolescenza, although the girl actors were only 11 or 12, I think you would find it pretty difficult to assert that they were exploited or harmed in any way, judging from a cursory look at their filmographies though I am open to persuasion otherwise by anyone who really knows. Nowadays the film couldn't possibly be made, which is probably a good thing overall simply because (in my view) young children should not be sexualised for the benefit of adults. Arguing that so much footage of pubescent sex was essential to the artistic integrity of the whole would have been difficult even then. Did the production team deliberately court controversy by using so much child nudity or were they genuinely taken aback by the reaction to its release? Western Europe in the 1970s was pretty liberal about such things, and still is by American standards (thank God!), but even so the boundaries of "mainstream" films must have been pushed back quite a bit with Maladolescenza. I've read all the reviews here by its stalwart defenders, who argue a good case for a unique film, but I remain to be fully convinced.
This film has so much to say about important issues, and does it so well in many ways, that I really do want to believe it was conceived as a serious work of art and not as a sop to the dirty raincoat brigade.
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