In 1968 the Italian director Pasquale Festa Campanile released La matriarca, a softcore sex comedy made for export. The English title is The Libertine. Catherine Spaak and Jean-Louis Trintignant star. In a bourgeois setting, a young widow named Mimi finds that her dead husband kept a hidden apartment for his kink. He never shared those fantasies with her, so she turns the flat into a laboratory. She seduces a series of men, samples what the film calls depravity, and watches how society judges a woman who says yes — and what happens when she stops saying yes.
For a BDSM audience the interest is not hardcore choreography. It is the hidden play space, and the widow sampling “perversion.” Late in the film she says that men call her a whore only when she refuses, or when she stops agreeing. The film treats that slur as social violence. She then meets a man who gives himself fully, values her sexual daring, and accepts her. His private kink room is where she rewrites who is allowed to want what. Spaak carries her from widow to sexual explorer.
Campanile sets the film in the late-1960s Italian sex-comedy wave, using secret rooms to smuggle fetish curiosity into export markets. It is about desire and blame, not a dungeon manual. Reviews split. The New York Times said it was not as clever as it pretends to be. The Guardian called it fake and unerotic. The Washington Post found the attitudes too conventional. The Chicago Tribune found it clumsy and unimaginative. Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times was kinder: at times pretty hot, with a little more style and wit than most Radley Metzger releases. The picture that stays is the matriarch taking the play apartment back, until she finds a partner who will not punish her for wanting.
