The best Lydia Mancinelli’s movies

Funny, entertaining comedy with a few storylines. All of them have one thing in common - a resort town of Rimini in Italy.

A string of sex murders has been plaguing Florence for almost 15 years, in which a serial killer brutally murders couples who are sneaking "a quickie" in public areas. A writer who is doing research for a book about the crimes sets out to uncover the identity of the killer, aided by his beautiful girlfriend. Based on a true story.

A man (Carmelo Bene) can not bear to be part of society. He considers himself a "jerk" and so invents its own philosophy, which involves the destruction of his land of Puglia where all citizens are devoted to the Catholic religion. However, the man can not destroy the belief of the pilgrims of Salento, because a woman would prevent that. It is an unknown "Santa Margherita", which tries to divert man from his weird and impossible philosophy. Successive scenes of the film show various situations unreal and dream in which the two protagonists try to obtain the best one on the other. After a blasphemous dialogue between monks, the man includes his whole philosophy in a Moorish building. In fact, this seems to have been the scene of the massacre of the famous 800 Martyrs of Otranto, which are considered by the scetic man the absolute death of Christianity.

Hermitage, defined by Bene as "a rehearsal for lenses", beyond any literal rendition - its narrative trace comes from one of his anti-novels, Credito Italiano V.E.R.D.I - displays his immediate attitude to thinking a cinematic language completely based on actor's movements and actions, and more specifically, on his presence and his schemes. Camouflaged or naked, still or moving, his body seems to play and be played at the same time, shifted by objective and subjective tensions, both metaphorically and visually speaking.

The "Hamlet" in this well-mounted Italian spoof is the Danish prince, not a small town or village. The movie irreverently draws on both the Shakespeare play and the 1877 story by Jules Laforgue. In the story, Hamlet (Carmelo Bene) is a would-be playwright. He suffers from inept Freudian analysis by Polonius (Pippo Tuminelli), and Ophelia and Gertrude (Isabella Russo & Luciana Cante) are women conjured up in his erotic imagination.