Erotic Quartet

The brash, all-American certainties of Russ Meyer's sexploiters find their exact opposites in the work of Metzger, whose stylishly shot and designed movies are riddled with 'European' ambiguities of mood, theme and sexual identity. Erotic Quartet is his most ambitious and 'personal' film: a study of an Italian bourgeois family's involvement with a girl who might or might not be a star in one of the 8mm blue movies they like to run at home. The films within the film generate some almost Pirandellian games with appearance and reality, but the movie's real claims to distinction in its field are its balanced sensitivity to male and female sexuality, and its bravura set pieces (notably the library set, decorated with blown-up dictionary definitions of erotic terms).