L'uomo la donna e la bestia (1977)

A small provincial town, where preparations are underway for a religious ceremony involving the entire population, is the setting for shady dealings and private dramas that the protagonists try to conceal behind a façade of respectability. A disillusioned communist tries to keep his wife Luciana in check. She is a nymphomaniac who has lost her grip on reality, living in a confused state between reality and imagination; she eats off the toilet seat and masturbates in front of a mirror, eventually committing acts of self-harm. A young butcher, attracted to a girl from town, tries to give physical form to his erotic fantasies by masturbating over the meat in the cold room of his shop. Giulia, a pregnant teenager, runs away from her family after telling her distraught mother that the father of her child is her own father, whom she herself seduced beside her grandfather’s deathbed. Rosanna, the frustrated wife of a farmer, tired of her husband’s abuse, finds refuge in a dreamlike realm that allows her to commit adulteries, even with the local priest. The young prostitute Sabina gives herself to anyone in a shack. A vagrant, also thanks to his skill with a slingshot, is regarded as an idol by the local children, and promises them that he will carry the cross in the procession. The vagrant enters the townspeople’s stories, somehow influencing their fates: first he helps Giulia after she faints; then he is welcomed into Sabina’s shack, where he has sex with her; next, Rosanna’s husband beats him up, convinced that his wife has cheated on him with the vagrant; finally, the communist himself comes to his rescue and takes him into his apartment. There, the vagrant has sex with Luciana, after which she commits an act of coprophagy on him, before stabbing him in the genitals with a pair of scissors. The act takes place in the presence of her husband, who remains impassive. In the end, the vagrant has disappeared, and in his place on the floor lies Luciana’s husband, dead, with the scissors in his belly. She is sitting on the sofa, completely absent.