The Tempter

A diabolical piece of work which pointlessly indulges the Italian obsession with convents, nuns, and - ever so discreetly - mortification of the flesh. Just who tempts whom and why remains a mystery: possibly the clues were lost in translation. It is never really sorted out why the film's medley of tormented characters - an incestuously-inclined minor prince; a woman remorseful after betraying her secret police torturer husband to her revolutionary lover; a worker priest who has been provoking strikes; a radical Bishop - remain within the decidedly photogenic but otherwise uninteresting confines of this particular convent hostelry. Nor is it at all obvious who the devil in the woodpile is - Glenda Jackson's Mother Superior or Claudio Casinelli's intruder. As Damiani protractedly works and reworks his material, the whole thing - especially with our heroine offering herself to the most ghoulish TV repairman ever to have graced the screen - looks more and more like a reworking of Theorem on a more pedestrian level.