This wicked looking poster for the nominally X-rated
Italian/German drama The Sex of Angels
and the Google plot synopsis, which reads “young women steal a yacht and kidnap
a young man and spend a weekend having sex and doing drugs,” really aren’t all
that misleading, although there’s a lot more to the story. The poster also
exaggerates the situation, as what is depicted is rather the result of a
conundrum brought on by irresponsibility followed by an even more irresponsible
course of action.
The setup to The Sex
of Angels is, of course, an appealing one to the male fancy. Being seized by three
beautiful modern-day angels and taken on a boat ride into the endless summer of
’68? Why not? It sounds like a good time, and for the most part it is, but in
trying to postulate what the film might be trying to say with its outcome, I
can’t help but put it in the context of ‘60s youth counter culture and the sexual
revolution and see it as a cautionary tale of seduction and widespread use of LSD
and what I thought was a kind of critical impression of the behaviors of the “sexually
liberated.”
Considering movies like Barbarella (1968), Top
Sensation (1969), and Russ Meyer’s
Vixen! (1968), it would seem that
the late ‘60s, the peak of the sexual revolution in the western world, was a
turning point for erotic movies. Sexually charged films from this era were not
only challenging censorship but were also challenging the monolithic wall of
puritanical behavior that associated sex solely with marriage, which also
mirrored the changing attitudes towards sex during the revolution.
With both “the
pill” and penicillin on the market, pregnancy and STDs were less of an issue,
and a woman’s sexuality outside of marriage was becoming more widely accepted,
unlike the vicious double standard from before when it was more permissible for unmarried men to have sex. Naturally, sex began to saturate the media, was
used to sell products, and became a big part of mainstream culture. In
addition, more and more married couples began experimenting with extramarital
sex.
After the Hays Code was put to sleep in 1968 sexploitation cinema would really
begin to thrive. With hopes of being free from the restraints of
censorship, erotica would be used to explore new creative avenues of
film making.
Inevitably, a lot of these so called sexploitation movies were taken
to court, but a good way erotic filmmakers could get passed this was to not only make their
movies sexually explicit but to make them intellectual and artful as well, which
was particularly more common in foreign sex movies. On the VH1 documentary Sex the Revolution, John Waters said that in order to win in
court you had to prove that a prosecuted sex film was socially redeeming, which
would then make it acceptable.
