The Libertine (Italian: La matriarca, literally “The Matriarch”) is a 1968 Italian sex comedy directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile and starring Catherine Spaak and Jean-Louis Trintignant. A young widow discovers her late husband’s secret apartment for kinky desires, then uses that space to reverse the sexual double standard and learn the perversions he never shared with her. Softcore Italian export comedy with a kink-initiation arc told from the woman’s side.
Plot: Widow, Secret Flat, Double Standard
Mimi learns that her recently deceased husband kept a hidden apartment dedicated to his kinky desires. Frustrated that he never explored those fantasies with her, she claims the flat as a laboratory and seduces a series of men, treating each encounter as a lesson in human “depravation” and in how society judges a woman who says yes—then stops saying yes. Late in the film she notes that men only call her a whore when she refuses, or when she stops agreeing. Finally she meets a man who shares himself fully, values her sexual daring, and accepts her without the double standard that marked earlier partners. His private kink room becomes the place where she rewrites who is allowed to want what.
Cast and Frame
Spaak carries Mimi from widow to sexual explorer; Trintignant anchors the male lead who eventually matches her openness. Campanile places the film in the late-1960s Italian sex-comedy wave—bourgeois settings and secret rooms used to smuggle fetish curiosity into export markets. For BDSM-media readers, the relevant machinery is the husband’s hidden play space, the widow’s deliberate sampling of “perversion,” and the monologue that names slut-shaming as social violence rather than hardcore SM choreography.
Reception
Howard Thompson (The New York Times) said it was “not nearly as clever, sophisticated and amusing as it archly pretends.” The Guardian called it “pseudo-sophisticated, so fake as to be positively sick making and, what is more, thoroughly unerotic.” Gary Arnold (The Washington Post) found the attitudes “far too conventional.” Kevin Thomas (Los Angeles Times) thought it was “at times… pretty hot stuff” with “a little more style and wit than most Radley Metzger releases.” Terry Clifford (Chicago Tribune) found it “more clumsy than clever… just as unimaginative as the film it attempts to parody.” For bdsmwild readers, the durable image is the matriarch reclaiming the play apartment until she finds a partner who will not punish her for wanting—Italian sex comedy on the libertine and SM-in-fiction shelf, not a dungeon manual.
