Here's an odd movie. It seems to be another entry in the "Emanuelle" genre of would-be classy but often insufferably pretentious, or just plain risible, European erotica. This movie is even more pretentious than most, however. It is set on a yacht and private Greek island of a gun dealer and libertine in the last days before the start of WWI. The libertine gets his companions on the "pleasure cruise" to act out parts he has assigned them from a famous erotic play about the goddess Aphrodite. Fantasy and reality begin to merge and become indistinguishable--at least until the erotic revelry is broken by real-world historical events.
Despite this arty, historical backdrop, the raison d'etre of this particular piece de resistance is pretty clear--sex, sex, and, of course, sex. The girl cast as Aphrodite is the virginal niece of one of the older passengers (Cappucine), who is being blackmailed by the host in order to get the younger woman to participate. The niece is played by the tres luscious Valerie Kaprinsky, who has a nice long full-frontal and full-dorsal nude scene at the beginning, but otherwise stays aloof from the erotic festivities (although her much less attractive body double does briefly participate in one orgy). The sex scenes here were no doubt spiced up to some extent with near-hardcore inserts, but most of the cast, with the exception of Kaprinsky and Cappucine, do actually seem to be participating to some degree.
Still, it isn't really much of a step for Kaprinsky to appear in a borderline hardcore film like this, but what's really surprising is that this film was directed--not by someone like Roger Vadim or Just Jaeckin--but by Robert Fuest, a fairly august British director usually associated with PG-rated horror flicks like "The Abomidable Dr. Phibes" or "And Soon the Darkness". Obviously, he is a little out of his element here. This isn't as good as it wants to be or as bad as it could have been, but it definitely is strange.
