Was a film ever more aptly titled? Fernando Di Leo's quasi-exploitation jaunt from 1978 came at a time in Italy's crazy, tortured, mega-pulpy '70s, amid the Argentos and Leones and Brasses and Pasolinis, when all bets on coherence and tastefulness seemed off, and the hangover of the '60s had lingered too long and turned into a permanent funk. What to do, then, but fashion a movie out of arguably the two most beautiful young models/actresses in the country, undress them at every opportunity, send them on a nose-thumbing road trip in the course of which every level of Italian society, from police bureaucracy to drug-addled communes to the Mob, is at the mercy of non-stop hip-swivelling and braless boogie-woogie? "I'm young, hot and pissed off!" Lilli Carati's fiery-eyed brunette trumpets right at the outset, when the band of nude beach-loungers accompanying her and uber-blonde Gloria Guida simply take off and leave the pair stranded, initiating their hitchhiking trip through an Italy strangely, inexplicably, unappreciative and even outright hostile to the spectacle of radiant post-teen waifs in open shirts who just want to party.

To Be Twenty is a very silly movie, but look at that title again - right away Di Leo is eulogizing the tragic passage of youth and youthful beauty, as movies have done better than any medium, and the sheer salacious spectacle of this film does, very consciously, tap into a near-universal sense of the gorgeousness, the irresponsibility, the carefree sex (experienced to whatever degree), the endless afternoons, we all leave behind as we evolve, against our wishes, into adults. Still, it'd be a mistake to look at Di Leo's controversial, and much-censored, film as anything but pure randy pulp, glorying as only French and Italian filmmakers spectacularly could in the improper fun to be had with softcore shenanigans. Carati and Guida are all sass and ba fungul as they confront disapproval everywhere they go in the Lazio burgs, broke, free and horny, eventually landing, pennilessly, in a bankrupt Roman commune. (They have no money for food, but their make-up and hair bills must've been extraordinary.) The girls loiter here for a good stretch of the movie, attempting to get the very high men lazing around to have sex with them and failing (which practically makes this film feel like science fiction), mocking a meditating mime who hasn't moved for weeks, telling their abused life stories to a roving documentary crew, experimenting with lesbianism. They even prostitute themselves in small ways just to survive, but neither the characters nor the film itself broods on this too deeply. In the abundance of confused feminist messages the screenplay musters, Valerie Solanas's militant S.C.U.M. Manifesto is read aloud, but sexual abuse is never a possibility. Carati and Guida, shimmying and bouncing their nubility around every room, are always in control of their bodies and their right to use them however they wish.

That is, until the end, which is when Di Leo's film runs so far off its happy-voyeurism rails that the producers re-edited the film down by ten minutes for an instant reissue. This long unseen climactic sequence comes without warning: on the run again after the commune gets busted, the girls traipse into a café and start bopping voluptuously to the jukebox, as a handful of unsavory men and what appears to be a constipated Mafia don look on. The situation simply builds steam until the men beset the maidens, the chase is on, the mob corners the girls in the woods, and in abrupt fashion rape and kill them in ways that suggest not exploitation so much as vicious, misogynistic loathing.

Exploitation, it is implied, is fine and even fun; just don't hate us for being pretty, young and sexually available. The abrupt ending of Di Leo's film is a slap in the face to anyone lost in the ridiculous, youth-nostalgic daydream of the rest of the film, and as such seems to make some kind of statement - either about the untamable and barbaric Catholic conservatism of Italian culture, or about the inevitable backlash against '60s-style hedonism. Whether the tragic ending to this sexy non-tale is an indictment of the malignant rapists or the heedless victims or both is a question left more or less permanently open thanks to the film's slipshod form and haphazard social portraiture. You're never quite sure where Di Leo stands because he's not filmmaker enough to have made himself clear.

But that's already taking this rambunctious trifle a little too seriously - the filmmakers were being daring with their downer climax, but it seems probable that they didn't know exactly why. The reedited version of To Be Twenty was no hit, either, but because of its basic pulchritude it had a life internationally in the '80s video market, while rumors of the original violent version floated in the fanboy ether, and crummy bootleg copies of it became valuable commodities. Amusingly, this new two-disc DVD edition features both editions of the film, as if it's Touch of Evil or something, and, as is characteristic of Raro Video, a plethora of scholarly supplements, from retrospective documentary to historical booklet to the original screenplay. For someone this movie is a bittersweet time capsule that just cannot be let go.

For more information about To Be Twenty, visit Raro Video.

by Michael Atkinson