Submission (Italian: Scandalo, “Scandal”) is a 1976 Italian erotic drama shot in Technicolor and directed by Salvatore Samperi from a screenplay he wrote with Ottavio Jemma. Franco Nero, Lisa Gastoni, Raymond Pellegrin, and Andréa Ferréol head the cast. It belongs to 1970s Italian drama-and-erotic cinema: marital deadness, workplace power, and a “respectable” woman’s conversion into a sexual subordinate. For BDSM-aware viewers it is not club etiquette—it is a wartime-adjacent scandal about desire and coercion sharing a pharmacy counter.
Plot: Pharmacy, Clerk, Escalating Demands
France, 1940, just before the invasion. Eliane is a pharmacist married to a dull husband, mother to a teenage daughter, attractive, passion dormant. One evening the pharmacy clerk mistakes her for another girl and makes a pass. She lets the spark catch and begins an affair with employee Armand.
Armand’s demands grow: sex under the pharmacy counter, undressing in front of a female employee who is also involved with him, further humiliations until Eliane is effectively his sex slave. When she finally admits her submission, he escalates again—demanding her teenage daughter as proof she will do anything. That final ask is the film’s moral cliff edge: power without ethics, framed as scandal and war-era corruption, not negotiated kink.
Cast
- Franco Nero — Armand
- Lisa Gastoni — Eliane Michoud
- Raymond Pellegrin — Prof. Henri Michoud
- Andréa Ferréol — Juliette
- Claudia Marsani — Justine Michoud
- Carla Calò — Carmen
Genre Placement and Adult Reading
Samperi stages domination as social-sexual plot engine rather than lifestyle identity. The pharmacy domesticates the dungeon: respectability upstairs, illicit command after hours. Armand’s spiral—workplace hierarchy, exhibitionist humiliation, total availability, then the unforgivable demand involving a minor—is criminal scandal cinema, not SSC fantasy. Lists of Italian films of 1976 place Scandalo among sex-and-melodrama exports; Technicolor and Nero’s international face distinguish it from pure hardcore. English title Submission sells the theme overseas; Italian Scandalo sells shame. Watch Gastoni’s slide and Nero’s predatory clerk energy as period power-exchange fantasy; keep the final demand in the “never” column for real practice.
