Cinema: Virtue Besieged

Mandragola, set in Italy at the close of the quattrocento, uses the stones of Florence to soften up a girl's resistance. As an impregnably virtuous Renaissance lady enduring a crash course in fertility, Rosanna Schiaffino is stretched out in bed with large, warm rocks on her stomach, then is marinated in giant tubfuls of broth, and finally is sealed, screeching, into a body-length hot-water bag to test another old wives' tale. More than 400 years after it was penned by the cynical Renaissance moralist, Niccolo Machiavelli, this ribald comedy classic still looks exuberantly out of bounds.

If the tantalizing Madonna Lucrezia seems proof against procreation, she is nonetheless a setup for seduction. Espoused by an insufferable clod who wants to get her with child but cannot, she falls prey to a heated young gallant (Philippe Leroy) who merely wants to get her to bed and does. The lover presses his suit with life-or-death urgency, disguising himself as the luckless lout who is supposed to perish by black magic after Lucrezia has downed a potion brewed of mandragola, or mandrake root, and spent the night with him. Once conquered, Lucrezia cherishes the lad's do-or-die passion, ultimately scores her own sexual coup over the hypocrisy shown in the affair by her cuckolded husband, her amoral mother and a venal priest.

Director Alberto Lattuada's actors are a gallery of perfectly chosen faces leering ever so faintly from a 16th century fresco. Dressed and undressed in sumptuous Renaissance style, or hatching intrigues among the cobblestones of two ancient Umbrian villages where the action was filmed, they look comfortably removed to another time. With a lusty feel for the broad, vulgar humor of the period, Lattuada adds a delectable scene at the public baths, where gentlemen voyeurs and unsuspecting ladies are suddenly desegregated by a collapsing wall. Making a new movie from an old play can easily bring both to ruin, but Director Lattuada, with the slow and graceful style of a man who appreciates the uses of leisure, deftly manages to preserve the original without entombing it.