MOVIE REVIEW : UPDATE OF ‘DEVIL IN THE FLESH’

Yet love, which is a form of selfishness involving two selves instead of one, sacrifices everything to its own interest, and lives off lies.

--Raymond Radiguet

In his posthumous 1923 novel “Devil in the Flesh,” Raymond Radiguet crystallized many adolescent moods: defiance, romanticism, spontaneity and selfishness. His portrait of a coldly precocious 16-year-old and his affair with an “older woman” (19) drips with poetic scorn and shocking lucidity. Comparatively, Marco Bellocchio’s modern film version of “Devil in the Flesh” (Laemmle’s Royal) is an oddity: a lower-keyed, more modulated sexual shocker.

Radiguet’s novel created a scandal in 1923, and Claude Autant-Lara’s film version another one in 1947. Yet, even though Bellocchio’s film got an “X” for one explicit scene of oral sex, it doesn’t leap toward the same dangerous voids.

The young Bellocchio’s work once suggested a fusion of the styles of Bunuel and Antonioni, and in “Devil,” he begins with a scene from the book, a threatened suicide, which could have had the savagery of “Viridiana.” As Radiguet wrote it--the mad maid raging on the rooftop over her embarrassed employers, the amateur fire brigade arriving after closing their shops, the entire town gathered underneath, cheering her on--it seem ideal for some fierce Bunuelian black wit. But in the film it’s all lost. The scene is intense, but it turns shallower, simpler: a melodramatic set-piece. So does much of the rest.

It’s a good film, but not really a scandalous one--for all its radical politics and unabashed sexuality. Bellocchio, in 1987, can show exactly what Radiguet and Autant-Lara had to leave out or suggest by ellipsis. And he does, repeatedly.

But what tends to be exciting in this film isn’t either sex, or romance, but aesthetic trappings: Giuseppe Lanci’s lucent cinematography; the saucy bite of Maruschka Detmers’ performance; the decor; the smooth, honeyed flow of images. This “Devil in the Flesh” is almost an art object. It doesn’t really sweat and bleed. And coming after both “Last Tango in Paris” and “In the Realm of the Senses,” it can’t really make the bourgeosie--objects of its scorn--sweat or bleed either. Even that controversial “X” scene is staged in a quiet, comic way. The boy, in bed, begins a pompous recounting of Lenin’s arrival in St. Petersburg; his lover’s activities, understandably, distract him.

Radiguet wrote the novel--based, exaggeratedly, on his own relationships--before he was 18; he was dead at 20. His style is spare, lyrical, brutal yet cool: full of tenderness shot through with bitter self-absorption. Except for the frequent Strendhalian aphorisms, it might have been a model for such modern post-moral chillers as “Less Than Zero.”

All this would seem ideal for the Bellocchio who made “Fists in the Pocket” and “China Is Near”--if not the director of 1983’s mellower “The Eyes, the Mouth.” And, apparently, Bellocchio first intended to film the story straight, in its period. (You wish he had.) Instead, this version--updated to include terrorism, motorcycles and TV--comes so far past the sexual revolution and AIDS, that it seems more old-fashioned than Radiguet’s.

Bellocchio’s lovers, Andrea (Federico Pitzalis) and Giulia (Detmers) are threatened less by society, than their nosy families--and Bellocchio’s promotion, or demotion, of the cuckolded husband from World War I soldier to repentant terrorist on trial, is an irony that backfires.

Bellocchio is usually at his best with male actors who can play stylish, fancy creeps, like Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni or Lou Castel. But here, his amateur lead, Pitzalis--a young graphic designer--is too unsmoldering, too handsomely opaque. Unlike Gerard Philippe in the 1947 film, he projects narcissism without depth--and, inevitably, the interest shifts to Maruschka Detmers, who gives a really spiced-up, erotically charged performance. Giulia’s psychological flashpoints spark most of the danger that the affair, for all its nerve-wracking secretiveness, often lacks.

It’s ironic that Giulia’s “madness” takes over the story. Bellocchio dedicates “Devil” to the radical psychologist Massimo Fagioli; here as elsewhere, he sees society’s oppressive attitude toward its deviants as the key to its deterioration. The villain, Andrea’s father, is a hypocritical Freudian analyst. Giulia’s incandescent flights of passion are part of her redemption. But the movie needs more of her and a much more stimulated Andrea--or, perhaps, it needs to grant her the tragedy that Bellocchio’s post-feminist upbeat ending denies. Most importantly, it needs more devilishness--and perhaps less flesh.

‘DEVIL IN THE FLESH’

An Orion Classics release. Producer Leo Pescarola. Director Marco Bellocchio. Script Bellocchio, Ennio De Concini. Camera Giuseppe Lanci. Music Carlo Crivelli. Art director Andrea Crisanti. With Maruschka Detmers, Federico Pitzalis, Anita Laurenzi, Riccardo De Torrebruna.

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

MPAA rating: X. (No one under 17 admitted.)