Sunday, September 4, 2016

LA CASA DE LAS PALOMAS (1972): A Spanish Teen's Sexual Affair with Mother's Lover


Here's a summary of what Lazarillo wrote on IMDB about La casa de las palomas (1972) [English: The House of the Doves]:
This is really a coming-of-age story about [Sandra] a young girl (Ornela Muti) who has a sexual affair with the spurned gigolo lover of her beautiful mother (Lucia Bose) [...]. [The] title "House of the Doves" [...]comes from a strange dove-invested hotel/brothel where the girl and her lover rendezvous.
Lucia Bose and Ornella Muti are both very appealing, especially given their respective overripe and underripe ages (Muti was kind of Italian Brooke Shields at this time but with talent [...]) This is not really an exploitative mother-daughter fantasy, however--it's arty [...]. 
This movie is simply non-exploitative in any way, which isn't a bad thing, especially when it's a movie about the sexual coming-of-age of a fifteen-year-old girl (and one who was played by an actress of about the same age).

I'll leave it at that, but I'll add that the opening scene implies that any of the Spanish schoolgirls would have been pleased to have taken Sandra's place and have had an affair with the (older) gigolo. 



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