vocklabruck Don't let the controversy fools you. Let me tell you this movie has a lot more than nude scenes. Actually it has a VERY DEEP meaning: It's a perfect tale visually beautiful and with a great score.This is one of those rare films you want to stop in the first minutes because what is shown goes beyond you, but for some reason you keep watching. It leaves a mark on you. This film is not for everybody, not recommended for those close minded conservative people who think kids are completely innocent creatures with no sexual desire, no bad intentions, no nothing. I mean, you have to admit they are human beings too. Then you will be able to see what is in the core of this tale.The story is about 3 adolescents who spend their holidays in a forest. I can't help finding these 3 characters highly stereotypical, but this is necessary. Actually this is how the film works, because you can find these stereotypes in almost every person:Laura (Lara Wendel, 12): the lovely, sensitive and naive girl who is in love with someone who doesn't love her back, the girl who will do ANYTHING to be with the others, even if that means to be humiliated to death.Fabrizio (Martin Loeb, 18): the screwed-up boy who controls other people deliberately using his strength and self-confidence superiority, the selfish boy who doesn't give a damn for anybody, the guy who is bad and enjoy it.Silvia (Eva Ionesco, 11): the dream blonde coming from outer space, the arrogant and malicious girl who is aware of her extreme beauty and will use it to manipulate other people.The acting could have been better, but if you have in count these 3 kids were the only characters who carried the entire movie on their shoulders they were great. Personally I think it could have been better to get a younger actor for the Fabrizio character, someone closer to the girls age. By the way, from these characters Silvia is maybe the least important but on the other hand it is the only one who keeps its feet on the ground. Silvia is not so innocent as Laura and neither so nuts as Fabrizio.I will not extend too much about the story, since other posters have commented enough, but basically Fabrizio and Silvia spend all their days making fun of Laura and tormenting her through cruel games until the point of risking her life. Just to mention a couple, the scene where Laura is tied and with a snake crawling over her and the scene where she is being hunted by the other two bullies using REAL arrows! There are also cruel scenes with animals. All these scenes are raw, graphic, and really disturbing, way more disturbing than the sex scenes most people talk.As for the sex scenes, actually most of them are precisely to show the cruelty of Fabrizio and Silvia towards Laura, and not to show sex itself. Since Laura loves the boy, Silvia and Fabrizio make love not only to enjoy themselves but to torture poor Laura. This movie has been banned in some locations considered as child pornography, while actually it is not. Yes, I admit the sex scenes are disturbing and could have been done not so graphically, but they are not pornographic. They appear nude but you will not see genital joint close-ups, erections, things you would expect in a real XXX film, and their moves/poses are clumsy because they are unexperienced and obviously not doing it for real. The boldest thing you see is two kids lying down nude one on the other and rubbing or a kiss near the female pubic area. Most of all is left to your mind, out of camera frame. Even kisses in mouth are simulated with the position of the heads. In fact, this film is not even erotic because the sex scenes are made in a kind of an angelical dream, not trying to arouse the audience.Sadly many people cannot see beyond those sex scenes and are not able to discover the real meaning of the story: the real evil teenagers can be. Even some covers I have seen of this film make you think wrongly that this is a shallow erotic film. Actually this is a story about cruelty. You will feel sorry for Laura because she is the target, she is the third party, she is the one who always takes the back seat and is being hated with no reasons. But somehow near the end she is cruel too, hiding something important.But I will stop spoiling. If you have the possibility, give this film a try because it really worths it. In fact, I could even say the story is good for teens, maybe not the film because it is very graphic, but the story itself teaches you a lot about life and why we are so cruel as adults. After all, we all were children once.

HumanoidOfFlesh A young boy named Fabrizio and girl Laura must psychically explore their budding sexuality.Things get complicated when arrogant Silvia enters the picture & our young hero is drawn to her and Laura now feels ignored.They begin playing cruel games and tormenting her.For instance,during a game of hide and seek Laura finds them lying naked beneath a tree and she is forced to view their love scene."Spielen wir Liebe" aka "Maladolescenza" has to be one of the most controversial films ever made.When it came out it was banned or heavily cut in many countries as child pornography.The film contains plenty of surprisingly graphic nudity provided by Martin Loeb,Eva Ionesco and Lara Wendel.Both girls were twelve years old at the time of making the movie.At least the sex scenes are quite tasteful and thankfully simulated,but I still think that the film-makers crossed the line.The film was actually banned in Germany on 28th of July 2006 due to its content,so DVD will be no longer available for public consumption.

tanje_beudel Having grown up in Amsterdam,Holland, where our liberal ideas are pretty much the norm, I have to say that I cannot understand why this movie caused so many problems when it came out! Sure, it is a movie of the 70's when peace and love were still there amongst a lot of old and younger people in Holland. I saw the film on a good DVD version last year and thought it was a love story about youth, rite of passage and growing up. The music in the background was pretty dire and some of the scenes were a bit dull (what was the snake scene all about??) but generally it wasn't a bad film. If some people get wound up about preteen nudity, then all I can say is they should get a life!!

netwallah When Europeans make films about summer holidays, they often view the time and place as liminal zones. Away from home, people are sometimes on some kind of threshold: the first or last happy time, the beginning of maturity, explorations of love, rites of passage. This film is like that. There are only three characters, Laura (Lara Wendel), Fabrizio (Martin Loeb), and Silvia (Eva Ionesco), and the story takes place in the forest near the young people's summer homes. Laura and Fabrizio explore the forest and discover high in the wooded hills a ruined "magic" town. Laura is eager to see him after a year apart, and she notes he has changed: he's sullen and withdrawn and increasingly given to teasing and tormenting her. The sexual tension between them is complicated by Laura's desperate wish to please him and his pleasure in denying her any sort of satisfaction, even conversation or a modest kiss. They find a cave underneath the castle, and lost down there Fabrizio undresses her and they make love. Just that once. And then he's back to his mean ways of frightening her or tantalizing her. This gets still worse when he discovers Sylvia, in some ways Laura's opposite, confident, blonde, mean, and fearless. She and Fabrizio torment Laura some more, in increasingly cruel ways, threatening to banish her, frightening her, shooting arrows at her, pretending to throw her from a cliff, making her serve them, and forcing her to watch them have sex. Fabrizio seems to get steadily worse, obsessed with living in the forest, imploring Sylvia to stay with him. As the summer is about to end and she's set to leave, he takes them into the cave again and tells Sylvia they're lost—and she panics, weeping and saying she'll go crazy and screaming. She can't hear Fabrizio pleading to let their idyll continue. Laura, who feels confused by Sylvia's vulnerability and by her own diffidence (because she knows the way out), comforts the other girl. And Fabrizio kills her, just as he's killed helpless birds already. What starts as an idyllic season succumbs to a corrosive pattern of conflating sex and power, so experimental cruelty is inevitable, and then the pastoral turns Gothic. Sort of. The movie looks wonderful, with gorgeous photography of woods and meadows and ruins, and the three young actors are very nice to look at. Wendel is soft-looking, anxious, expectant, longing—she's the best actor among them. Loeb is not a petulant adolescent, but he seems dissatisfied with things any boy his age would celebrate forever. Ionesco is an odd mixture of radiance and plainness, her golden hair all cloud-like and her skin fine, but her face is also rather ordinary looking from certain angles, and there's something almost unformed and childlike about it, though her ease before the camera makes it difficult to spot (she was the favourite model for her mother, a famous photographer). Wendel appears more attractive because she's more delicate, more hesitant, and more sympathetic. Finally, it would be nice to see a film about young people discovering sex and love and joy without this sour undercurrent of punishment.