A middle-age professor and appraiser of rare books (I think that's what he is anyway) comes to stay with a friend to appraise his book collection(?). He dallies with his friend's wife (Assumpta Serna) and a female friend of the family. But he is mostly drawn to the couple's alluring teenage daughter (Florence Guerin) after he spies her having sex on the beach.
They made of ton of these kind of movies in Europe in the 70's, to the point that they could be considered their own genre (maybe "lolita-sploitation" films). The worst offenders were the Italians and the French. The Italian films were much more melodramatic and they were never afraid to ladle on the sleaze. The French films, on the other, were very beholden to Eric Rohmer films like "Claire's Knee" and "Pauline at the Beach", so they tended be pseudo-classy and very talkative, which is a problem since most of them are too derivative and disreputable to have ever been given subtitles. Despite being listed under a Spanish title here, this is mostly a FRENCH film. It is in unsubtitled French with title in the credits "La Jeune Fil e L'enfer" (basically "The Young Girl and the Hell"). Many of the French films used actual underage lolita actresses, but this one has Florence Guerin, a voluptuous beauty who probably could have passed for 21 when she was 15, and she was much closer to 21 here. If Guerin is less than believable in the role though, a then twenty-something Assumpta Serna is downright laughable as her mother (or maybe step-mother?).
Still, this movie is pretty sexy. Florence Guerin is stunning, and only the most hardened David Hamilton-type ephebophiles are going to be disappointed when this voluptuous beauty sheds her clothes. There is one great scene where the professor is about to have sex with the daughter and her mother knocks on the door of his study/bedroom. While the daughter hides naked in the closet, her clothes hurriedly thrown beneath the bed, the mother seduces the professor. The kinkiest thing is that she sees her daughter's clothes under the bed and probably knows she's in the closet while they're having sex, but doesn't say anything. Then, as soon as the mother leaves, the daughter come running out of the closet to throw some MORE sex on the guy (for a rare book appraiser, this guy gets more action than Johnny Depp in the "The Ninth Gate"--and he's no Johnny Depp).
This is obviously a pretty far-fetched male fantasy. But it has way too much dialogue and scenes of people reading from books, They really shouldn't have couched the considerable exploitation elements in rather pathetic and boring attempts at "class". Florence Guerin, especially is impressive and kind of strikes me as an 80's Gallic version of Christina Lindberg. But Lindberg is a cult legend, not just because she was a post-adolescent sex bomb, but also because she was in entertaining movies. Guerin was perhaps in some entertaining movies, but this sure isn't one of them. It isn't exactly "hell" either though. . .
