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DIRECTED BY: Radley Metzger

FEATURING: Frank Wolff, Erika Remberg, Silvana Venturelli, Paolo Turco

PLOT: A bourgeois family invites a carnival performer back to their castle, convinced they recognize her from a stag film.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The Lickerish Quartet questions the very nature of reality through a series of breezy sex romps. If that’s not enough in itself, there’s a library floor paved with bawdy vocabulary, a magic act that disappears the lead actress from the film within the film, and the fact that every line of dialogue sounds like a riddle.

COMMENTS: In The Lickerish Quartet, softcore pron peddler Radley Metzger steals the Teorema scenario with a healthy dose of inspiration from playwright-philosopher Luigi Pirandello. Throughout his directing career Metzger remained aware of his roots as an editor. He preferred to adapt well-known literary works for his films so he wouldn’t have to worry about plot. The Lickerish Quartet loosely adapts Pirandello’s play “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” first performed in 1921. At the premier, audiences revolted in protest of the fourth-wall breaking metanarrative structure. Here, Metzger constantly reminds us we’re watching a movie through all the tricks of the editor’s trade. The film changes between color and black and white, between past and present, with playful disregard for continuity, and the film within the film and the core story switch places in diagetic reality, along with both sets of cast members.

After growing bored with watching a stag loop together, a middle-aged man (Wolff), his wife (Remberg), and her young adult son (Turco) decide to visit the carnival. They see a girl (Venturelli) in a white catsuit riding the Wall of Death on a motorcycle, and when she takes a bow and removes her helmet she’s revealed to be the spitting image of an actress in the blue movie the family just watched. The father decides to invite her back to their castle to show her the film. The son wishes he wouldn’t, but the mother thinks it will be fun.

The carnival girl accepts the invitation. From the moment she sets foot inside the castle, flashbacks suggest she somehow remembers it. A brief shot shows a man being killed before he falls through a doorway and down a flight of stairs, prompting the carnival girl to ask, “Who has the gun? To do the shooting?”

What they expected to be a fun flirty lark has already taken an ominous turn for the family. “There isn’t going to be any shooting,” the father says; “but of course there is,” the girl replies. Before they show her the stag film, the son performs a magic act and the carnival girl disappears. When the reel begins to play, her doppelgänger’s face is no longer visible on screen. On a third viewing, the blonde girl in the film is an entirely different actress. The mother and father are confused and disappointed, but they convince the girl to spend the night.

In Pasolini‘s Teorema a mysterious stranger visits a bourgeois family and seduces each of them in turn. The results of the seductions vary, but in the end the total effect is devastating. Quartet runs this plot backward. Metzger rewinds the bickering family back to their beginnings, to World War II, the source of their conflicts and tensions.

A look into the source text reveals Metzger hews pretty closely to Pirandello’s scenario. The “Six Characters in Search of an Author” are identified only by their roles within a step-family, the result of a woman’s affair sanctioned by her husband. The plot centers around the complexities of their relationships and the impact of transgressive sexuality. In the metanarrative, their stories were left uncompleted by their original creator, so they seek an author in order to achieve resolution.

In updating it to the present day and paring down the family to four members, Metzger makes the material more accessible to contemporary audiences and a society still coming to terms with the legacy of WWII. The carnival girl becomes “The Author” who literally fleshes out the characters’ memories, personalities, and desires.

Pirandello believed reality is an illusion and everyone should be aware of it; he also believed this awareness would lead only to unhappiness. Metzger is far less pessimistic. The carnival girl makes the family members whole people through their sexual encounters with her. Far from tearing them apart, this shared experience brings the family closer together and makes them capable of seeing each other’s different perspectives.

In creating an avant-garde skin flick with philosophical underpinnings, Metzger confused and frustrated critics, who struggled with how to classify Quartet when they didn’t outright dismiss it. Featuring Metzger’s usual attention to the details of production design, Quartet straddles the ditch between low- and high-brow with ease. Ultramodern décor artfully situated within an actual medieval castle mirrors the characters’ inner journeys from the present to their pasts. Despite frequent syncopated cuts to enigmatic scenes (a close-up of a reclining woman’s crossed ankles and magenta high-heeled shoes; the dying man falling down the stairs), a mood of dreamy sensuality prevails.

With its dual focus on subjectivity and sexual mores, it’s no surprise Pirandello’s play spoke to Metzger as a film maker. Metzger learned editing during his military service while working on propaganda films for the United States government. He knew better than most people how movies shape reality, and vice versa.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[Metzger and co-writer Michael de Forrest] must have dreamed up the story line late at night, for it’s a weirdo of the first order, a confusing blend of fantasy, reality, and illusion…”–Thomas Blakely, The Pittsburgh Press (contemporaneous)

The Lickerish Quartet [Blu-ray]

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