Sweet Deceptions

Francesca is seventeen and spends a day in Rome trying to work out whether she is in love. She watches the couples around her, listens to what they say, and puts off her own decision. The man she is drawn to is a friend of the family, a divorced architect of thirty-seven. The film is not the story of a relationship but of the twenty-four hours in which a girl is left alone with her own desire for the first time. Alberto Lattuada's film brought Catherine Spaak into the cinema and started a long legal process in Italy. Approval to release it came only in 1961, after roughly eleven minutes of cuts; a prosecution for obscenity ended in acquittal in 1964 and the seizure was lifted from the original print. Rocco and His Brothers and L'Avventura came under comparable pressure in the same years.