Directed by Alberto Cavallone, Blue Movie begins with a harrowing scene in which a beautiful young woman named Silvia (Dirce Funari) is brutally raped out in the rural Italian countryside. She survives the assault and tries to head back to civilization when she's picked up by Claudio (Claude Maran), a photographer. He takes her back to his place and we assume he'll get her the help that she obviously needs, but it soon becomes obvious that this is not going to be the case. Claudio is holding Silvia hostage.

From here we meet Daniela (Danielle Dugas), a model that Claudio shoots. It doesn't take long before his tendency to spew hatred and nastiness to her shows up and his obvious ‘need' to control women takes shape. She's coerced into going down on him, after which he beats her. Soon enough, he's got Daniela held in his studio, using her and abusing her as he sees fit and forcing her to bend to his will if she wants to survive. If she resists, he'll let her die of starvation, or worse. Things quickly spiral out of control from here, as Claudio forces her into increasingly degrading situations while the events from the beginning of the film collide with the mental scars left on Claudio's psyche from his time spent as a reporter on location during the Vietnam War.

Light on plot but heavy on both atmosphere and mood, Callavone's Blue Movie would seem to channel the arthouse aesthetic of films like Sweet Movie and In A Glass Cage with the more confrontational rape/revenge aspects of a film like They Call Her One Eye. The end result is something that feels like a mix between the output of Pier Palo Pasolini and Andrzej Zulawski, in that it uses the artistic freedom afforded by the medium to present some challenging and often unpleasant content in a manner ripe with allegory and metaphor. At times quite sexually violent and frequently dealing with scatological nastiness and coprophilia, it doesn't leave much to the imagination in terms of what it shows, but by mixing in stock footage of the war and the atrocities that it entails, we can see how the director's anti-war ethos creeps into the narrative in sometimes less than subtle ways.

By setting most of this atrocity exhibition against some beautiful classical music (Bach is used frequently), Callavone creates some interesting contrast. The film, or more specifically the filmmaker behind it, seems to insist on contrasting the beautiful with the hideous and the sacred with the profane, peeling back the layers and exposing the ugly side of humanity but pausing and giving us enough reasons to ask why it's there in the first place. It's heavy, heady stuff. The performances are sometimes unusually distant but somehow that works as this is a story about some very broken people. There isn't a whole lot of story here and much of the film does seems like a series of nasty vignettes rather than what most would consider to be a traditional narrative, but there's more to the film than simple shock value (though it offers up plenty of that) if you're willing to think about not only what the film shows but why it shows it and how it presents the material. The inclusion of news reel and mondo style ‘real life' footage from throughout the decades leading up to the era in which the picture is set makes it clear that the historically documented tendency for man to commit whatever sin need be committed in the effort to gain control over others.

Video:

Blue Movie is presented on DVD in 1.33.1 fullframe which would appear to be the film's original aspect ratio. The video quality here isn't great but Raro has stated that the only surviving 16mm elements were in pretty bad shape (which is why this release is DVD only, they didn't feel a Blu-ray release would be practical). Some noise reduction has obviously been applied here, probably in an attempt to smooth things over. There's a fair amount of print damage visible and the image is often soft and murky looking. But hey, if this is as good as it's going to get, than that's that. It's certainly watchable enough, particularly if you're someone who has spent years digging through obscure cult and foreign oddities and are therefore accustomed to less than stellar video quality.