Piero Schivazappa’s The Laughing Woman is a nasty but delightful bit of Euro cult business that radically embraces the female body as a source of profound power. This stands in contrast to Blind Beast, in which a woman runs in fear from her male captor. In Masumura Yasuzō’s film, also from 1969, the woman eventually comes to exercise an active role in exploring her own desires, but it’s in keeping with her captor’s aesthetic sensibilities, or the “art of the touch.”
Though no one articulates it as such in The Laughing Woman, it’s as if the film vows to inaugurate what we might call the the “art of the breasts.” For one, as Maria (Dagmar Lassander) dances topless for her psychotic captor, Doctor Sayer (Philippe Leroy), her voluptuous body means more to him than her words. It’s as if Schivazappa and his collaborators somehow leapt 20 years into the future to read French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s Seduction, which understands the titular term as a game of reversals involving sex and death.
The Laughing Woman is a fundamentally exploitative admixture of graphic sexual content and comedy. Maria, working as a journalist in Dr. Sayer’s office, is captured by him and taken to his villa, where she’s initially made witness to, and then a participant in, his sadomasochistic activities. Sayer objects to Maria’s favoring of male sterilization, and it’s later revealed that his entire motivation for capturing, torturing, raping, and then murdering women revolves around how threatened he feels by the suggestion that men could be entirely dispensed with were there a sperm bank large enough to continually perpetuate the species.
It’s absurd and unhinged material, to be sure, but Sante Achilli’s cinematography, marked by ultra-saturated reds that are suggestive of Mario Bava’s work from the period, is deliriously keyed to the hysteria. Throughout, The Laughing Woman effectively sustains its heightened, ecstatic tone through, among other things, its use of extreme close-ups and canted angles.
Seduction plays a role not only in Maria’s strategy to eventually turn the tables on Sayer, but also in Schivazappa’s direction, which invites us to delight in its characters’ perversions as a form of play. It’s also to Schivazappa’s credit that, as Maria gradually becomes the one with all the power, the film doesn’t devolve into a simplistic feminist rallying cry. It remains edgy for its suggestion that sex, not politics, is where actual power and knowledge exists. Laura Mulvey wrote in 1973 that by analyzing the male gaze, it was her intention to “destroy” pleasure. The Laughing Woman suggests an alternative feminist lineage is possible.
Image/Sound
Mondo Macabro’s 4K transfer of Piero Schivazappa’s The Laughing Woman looks terrific, with vibrant colors and a depth and delineation of finer details, especially in its outdoor daytime sequences. The DTS-HD 2.0 Master Audio tracks, in English and Italian, respectively, are robust and dynamic in their balancing of dialogue and Stelvio Cipriani’s memorable score, though as is common in Italian cinema, there are occasional moments where characters speak Italian on the English track, suggesting some original materials may have been lost.
Extras
The crown jewel is Kat Ellinger’s in-depth commentary track, throughout which the critic digs into Radley Metzger’s involvement in the film’s U.S. distribution. Ellinger explains how critics were largely baffled by the film upon its initial release, and that its focus on female pleasure finds its roots in the Marquis de Sade, among other authors. Ellinger also discusses the effect that the recently abolished Hays Code had on global film production and distribution, and how Dr. Sayer can be read as a proto-Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. A new interview with Schivazappa allows him to delve into The Laughing Woman’s conception and production, while also touching on his thematic interests as a filmmaker. There’s also an informative video essay by writer Rachael Nisbet on the film’s production design, plus trailers and an animated photo-novel by writer and filmmaker Jacques Spohr.
Overall
Sexual aberrations have rarely looked and felt as seductive as they do in Piero Schivazappa’s The Laughing Woman, which gets a deserving red carpet treatment from Mondo Macabro.
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