The Libertine, also know as La Matriarca, is a 1968 film directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile and starring Catherine Spaak. IMDB
A wealthy man, Franco, suddenly dies and leaves everything to his young, beautiful wife, Margherita (aka Mimi). She finds that he had been seeing a string of mistresses, and sets out on a journey of sexual exploration.
Mimi is not terribly broken up about her husband’s death. She’s more upset when he finds his secret pad for meetings with his mistresses, and sees him with other women in home movies. (These movies are shot with editing and multiple camera angles, so they’re not realistic as secret surveillance.) One of the women is her best friend, Claudia. These films include Claudia whipping a woman while Franco watches, Claudia and Franco “playing doctor”, and Franco doing a “ravishment” scene on Claudia.
Mimi is offended that her late husband never did any of these things with her. To fill in the gaps in her sexual education, she buys a copy of Psychopathia Sexualis and studies it. Supposedly, this explains to her that her sneezing and allergy symptoms are actually signs of her repressed arousal.
While other characters take the division of women into “wife” and “mistress” for granted, Mimi disagrees and goes on an adventure of sexual discovery. (It’s not unlike Belle de Jour.)
Some of these episodes are slightly kitsch sex romps. E.g. Mimi has a fantasy of being whipped, naked, by her tennis instructor. Later, she’s the aggressor when she approaches him in the showers. He protests, “But I’m in training!” Afterwards, she uses her lipstick to draw a question mark next to the “men” sign.
Others are a bit stranger. Mimi frequently feigns weakness to manipulate men, as when she pretends to twist her ankle so she can trick a man into giving her a piggy-back ride. Instead of sexual frankness, she has to play the damsel in distress. In another vignette, she’s mistaken for a streetwalker by a man. She observes that it’s the men she wouldn’t sleep with who call her a whore.
A couple of moments are quite dark. A man at a party (listed as “Mr. X” in the credits) rips off her clothes and rapes her in her late husband’s apartment. This is the most blatant “starts as rape, ends in passion” scene I’ve ever seen. Afterwards, Mimi comments (in voiceover), “As my mother said, if you can’t escape it, you might as well enjoy it.” The man even hangs around and chats afterwards, and Mimi only mildly criticizes him for the experience.
As is typical for sex movies of this time, there are scenes with various kinks. Mimi and her friend Claudia flirt with lesbianism, when Claudia gives Mimi a live beetle on a chain as jewelry. Mimi then intrudes on her live-in maid in her bedroom to show her the beetle and ask about her sex life with her fiancee.
Mimi also hooks up with a dweeby guy who wants to invite over another woman. This turns into a jungle-explorer scenario, in which Mimi is the chained-up damsel, the guy is the would-be rescuer in a pith helmet, and a black woman in a leopard print dress as the savage. Mimi realizes she’s the third wheel in this scene, casually shrugs out of her bonds, and leaves.
The last act of the film is Mimi pursuing an uptight doctor. She even becomes a student so he will take her on as his assistant. She strips down to her panties in his car while he is driving on the highway, then scurries into her apartment. The doctor actually spanks her and slaps her a few times in the face, but tells her that he doesn’t mind that she’s had other men, or will continue to have them. The last scene is her in just her panties, riding him on all fours, “Phyllis and Aristotle” style.
It’s disappointing yet predictable that Mimi has to stop her open exploration as a sexually and economically independent and return to the constraints of heterosexual marriage (even if it is an open marriage.) This is a classic case of a “square up”: Mimi’s carnivalesque sexual transgressions have to be contained by the end of the narrative.
Like a lot of adult mainstream films of this era, BDSM is just one of the variety of sexual practices presented, though somewhat laughed off as absurd theatre.
