Mondo Macabro: Forbidden Game of Love (1975) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Mondo Macabro

Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia, the openly gay filmmaker behind the unofficial Spanish A Clockwork Orange knockoff Murder in a Blue World and Cannibal Man, is often compared to the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini or more recently Pedro Almodovar for his naturalistic social realism and punctuated discomfort.  Usually dealing in juvenile delinquency and violence, Iglesia was a member of the Communist Party during the General Franco dictatorship and as a result ran into many censorship problems with his films including ones which addressed his homosexuality.  A multifaceted filmmaker who dealt in many genres including science-fiction and domestic melodramas, nowhere were the censorial problems scissoring away at his work stronger than the ones befalling his 1975 neorealist sardonic sociopolitical jaunt Forbidden Game of Love. 
 
Following in the youthful footsteps of Murder in a Blue World which featured Lolita actress Sue Lyon in the lead, the film also entitled Forbidden Love Game a kind of modern day spin on The Most Dangerous Game involving a professor who imprisons two of his students in the basement of his mansion became a lightning rod for the Spanish censors who demanded forty-two cuts before being releasable.  Though featuring frequent nudity including from its then-underage actress Inma de Santis, the picture largely drew consternation over its political implications that were clearly aimed at Franco’s reign.  Despite this, the original unexpurgated print survived the test of time and following a new 4K scan of the original camera negative and released in the United States for the first time by Mondo Macabro, Forbidden Game of Love though featuring a randy cover of a woman being groped by male hands is secretly a little masterpiece of political satire filled with terrific performances from all the actors in this snarky display of power struggles between the young and old.
 
Dandy, possibly gay middle-aged literature professor Don Luis (Javier Escriva) lives a tranquil existence in his secluded countryside mansion with his thirty-something servant (and maybe lover) Jaime (Simon Andreu from Die Another Day) driving out to school in the city to a half-interested classroom.  On his way home however, he spots two of his students Miguel (John Moulder-Brown from Deep End) and Julia (Inma de Santis) playing hooky and hitch-hiking their way out of town.  Pulling over offering to pick them up, he takes them home to his mansion where they immediately jump into their own private bedroom for sex.

Following a good night’s rest and hardy meal, the couple decides they want to go for a stroll outside only to discover at gunpoint they’re not allowed to leave the property grounds and are locked in a basement before eventually being subjugated to humiliating sex games.  However, what they don’t know is Jaime who stands guard over Don Luis’ transgressions shares in their woes and thirst for freedom and/or power and the once innocent teenaged hunted become the hunters themselves.  Joining forces with Jaime, the stage is set to overthrow Don Luis’ empire and rather than go to the police instead they set out to remake the professor’s mansion in their own image.

 
Androgynous as well as omnisexual, taboo titillating and eventually sardonic as the power tables turn and shift into something parodying the youth movement that would later blossom into the director’s own quinqui youth films, Forbidden Game of Love at first feels like a proto-Dogtooth with children forbidden from leaving their home as their confused sexuality starts to infect one another.  But then it becomes an anarchic kind of La Grande Bouffe with traces of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth where the elites have the rug yanked out from under them and having all the money and power and the world can mean very little in the grand scheme of things.  

Opening initially on numerous Richard Wagner records playing to Don Luis’ Shakespearean delight and demeanor, over the course of the film reverence for classicism goes to the wayside particularly when the kids takeover of the mansion results in tons of Western pop icons like Marlon Brando and The Beatles.  Soon the carnal sex games with the new trio, played fearlessly by all three leads, become further entwined in their perversity while the aged Don Luis begins to crust over locked away.  Probably most startlingly is Inma de Santis who initially is the innocent and frail femme to a cunning and conniving fatale who very rapidly ascends the ranks as the new ruler of this aberrant dysfunctional household.

 
Rarely shown in its country of origin for decades after much scissoring and an unexpected reemergence of the original unedited director’s cut version in recent years, Forbidden Game of Love while indeed taboo-busting and provocative comes off less as eroticism and more as snarky subversion.  With takeover elements Spring Breakers viewers will appreciate in a sociological context, the film doesn’t intend to titillate so much as trick the viewer into a kind of satirical trap that flirts with your comfort zones while being a kind of Marquis De Sade structured foray into political lampooning.  Characters that initially seem like real world figures gradually evolve into mythic if not Oedipal icons losing their humanity over the course of the movie.  

As you watch the film, it slowly moves away from kink towards being a broad study of the nature and ethics of power structures.  The kind of film post-The Dreamers Bernardo Bertolucci would’ve envisioned, Forbidden Game of Love while being an intermediary period for its writer-director bridging Murder in a Blue World and his quinqui work stands today via Mondo Macabro’s 4K restored release as a singular political satire, a film that begins as a quasi-transgressive thriller that soon meditates on the power plays governing the modern world.  It most certainly sneaks up on you.

--Andrew Kotwicki