This article appeared in the July 5, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Devil in Miss Jones (Gerard Damiano, 1973)

Watching porn on the big screen with a roomful of strangers is a social situation for which anyone not of a 1970s Times Square peep-show vintage will likely have little etiquette training. If Emily Post ever wrote a chapter called “How to behave in a moist theater at a packed film-festival screening of a hard-core movie,” it has sadly been lost. And yet, there we all were, 168 souls in the un-air-conditioned dark, sweating slightly onto our vinyl seats, lanyards sticking to our necks, bravely and gravely watching the gradual engorging of a four-foot-tall close-up of a penis, under the expert oral ministrations of newly enthusiastic fellatrix Justine Jones (Georgina Spelvin).

Amongst director retrospectives, restorations of Arab and African cinema classics, silent-film serials, 20th-century Hollywood megahits, and, in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022), at least one garish 21st-century mega-miss, The Devil in Miss Jones (Gerard Damiano, 1973) enjoyed a sold-out screening at the 2024 edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. The film follows Jones through a debaucherous afterlife subsequent to her death in what is the most trigger warning–worthy aspect of the movie: a procedural suicide scene, set to an unexpectedly plaintive piano score. Upon dying, she is informed by a blandly sympathetic bureaucrat that, as a suicide, she’s bound for hell regardless of her blameless prior life. She begs for the chance to enjoy some of the sins of the flesh that, as a virgin, she never got to sample: if she’s gonna do the time, she might as well do the crime.

The screening was introduced as “not just a great porn movie, but a great movie, period.” While it’s tempting to nod loftily in agreement, it also feels wrong to take, even notionally, the porn out of this foundational porno-chic text. The Devil in Miss Jones demands respect for its superior filmmaking, its craftily ironic plotline, and Spelvin’s magnetism, but it does not seek to be respectable. It seeks to turn you on, and often succeeds—though less so during Miss Jones’s ill-advised dalliances with various fruits, and, in one surreally obscene instance, with a snake (even if it does not end up where you fear it will). Of course, there was some performative tittering from an audience with no guardrails for responding en masse to a porn movie’s absolute lack of coyness; smut, especially in a communal setting, can make us uncomfortable because, for all the rehabilitation implied by the film’s presence in this august festival, it remains proudly resistant to the usual cinephile intellectualization. However artificial and contrived in execution, in intention the skin flick is ruthlessly honest, heroically nonmetaphorical, and completely irreducible: no one watching an explicit act of coitus frets over whether the director is actually hinting that elsewhere, a train is going into a tunnel.

The Devil in Miss Jones was the only blue movie playing in Bologna this year, but that’s not to say that it was thematically unique. Miss Jones’s derangement was echoed in various female manias (albeit less nympho-) across the massive program. Women were driven mad on screen—mostly, though not always, by men and their pesky patriarchy—from Iran to Manila, from Chicago to Czechoslovakia. In the oddball Czech comedy Murdering the Devil (1970), a woman (Jiřina Bohdalová) is so desperate to be a wife that she panders to the every whim of her cartoonishly gluttonous boor and bore of a suitor. The sole directorial outing from Ester Krumbachová, Věra Chytilová’s co-writer on Daisies (1966), the film delights in ripely antic exaggeration. But it was fascinating—and, to my mind, more satisfying—to see a similar narrative play out in far more restrained fashion in Filipino director Lino Brocka’s Bona (1980). Here Nora Aunor’s eponymous heroine is the lovelorn fan of a washed-up, swaggering movie bit-player. She makes herself into his live-in skivvy despite the humiliations to which he subjects her. Yet no matter how pitiable her circumstances, Bona is never pitiful; Aunor imbues the character with a self-possession that makes her final, gruesome rebellion cathartic not just for Bona, but for every worthy woman who ever wasted her time on a worthless man. It might seem an act of madness, but really it’s the first fully sane deed she’s committed after emerging from the delusion of unreciprocated, exploited love.

There were much less dire but no less insightful takes on women navigating difficult romantic and professional entanglements in Stephanie Rothman’s The Working Girls (1974), a dizzily comedic deconstruction of the trap of mid-’70s capitalism, and in Chantal Akerman’s frothy yet melancholic musical Golden Eighties (1986). And we got a vision of patriarchal oppression severe enough to induce a semi-dissociated state in The Sealed Soil (Marva Nabili, 1977), one of the few films to have been directed by an Iranian woman prior to the 1979 revolution. Many considered this a standout of the festival, but I confess that despite its unquestionable historical value, I found it a chore, with its distancing wide shots of a character we never properly get to know, eking out a meager, repetitive existence based almost entirely around grain-sorting and chicken-shooing.

This edition’s keynote retrospective—a selection of films by Ukrainian-born American filmmaker Anatole Litvak—also had its fair share of unstable women, most obviously with Olivia de Havilland’s still-impressive, Oscar-nominated turn in The Snake Pit (1948), a gratifyingly unsensational drama set largely in a mental institution. But a strain of madness is also present in the handsome, occasionally stodgy Anastasia (1956), even if Ingrid Bergman’s titular amnesiac-imposter is rather blasted off the screen by Helen Hayes’s appropriately imperious turn as the diminutive dowager empress. Indeed Litvak’s filmography, which is uneven in a way that rather defied the curators’ best efforts at cohesion, is characterized by a slight staidness, overcome in his best movies by some blazing performance or other. De Havilland in The Snake Pit, Edward G. Robinson in the crime-movie curio The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938), and, best of all, James Cagney in the wonderful City for Conquest (1940) provided the brightest and most soulful moments in a spotty selection that mainly served to prove that, after the 2023 edition’s more successful deep-dive on Rouben Mamoulian, not all prolific mid-century Hollywood emigré directors can necessarily be reclaimed as classic-model auteurs.

If anything, the rediscovery crown this year was snaffled by the revelatory section dedicated to overlooked Japanese director Kôzaburô Yoshimura, regarded in his time as the natural successor to Kenji Mizoguchi—indeed, Yoshimura’s greed parable An Osaka Story (1957) was the project Mizoguchi had been working on at the time of his death. A focus on traditions sacrificed to progress emerges as a shining through line in the exquisite Yoshimura Ritrovato selection, which included the achingly beautiful coming-of-age tale On This Earth (1957), the extraordinary geisha melodrama Clothes of Deception (1951), and the scintillating masterpiece Sisters of Nishijin (1952)—an Ozu-level-devastating ode to family and disappearing artisanal craft. Yoshimura’s movies are as poetic and precise as haikus, and yet utterly eviscerating for anyone who shares my particular kink for tales of decent people ceaselessly apologizing to each other for circumstances for which they are not to blame.

Unless you count me absolutely losing it for Sisters of Nishijin, the Yoshimura movies largely bucked the female-madness trend. So it’s good that my final film of the festival—Victor Sjöström’s magnificent 1928 silent The Wind, which screened al fresco in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore—embraced it in such style. Brilliantly accompanied by a live orchestra and by the obliging weather, which whipped up warm, tousling breezes in sync with the on-screen cyclones and tornadoes, this already sublime movie essentially became a 4DX experience. The white horse representing Lillian Gish’s wind-induced madness galloped in semi-dissolve over her expressively anguished face. Knots of passing teenagers stopped to gape, and transfixed tourists forgot all about their melting gelatos. Call me fanciful, but in that moment we were all a little mad, as we all submitted to the same glorious, collective delusion that grips this beautiful city for a few days in June every year.

Jessica Kiang is a freelance critic with regular bylines in Variety, Sight and Sound, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, and is the international programmer of the Belfast Film Festival.