Avere vent’anni (1978) is one of the most infamous Italian shockers of the seventies and perhaps the most controversial film in Fernando Di Leo’s career. Di Leo wrote, produced and directed Avere vent’anni as a kind of statement on the social fallout of hippie culture and the inevitable oppression of feminism. Much of Avere vent’anni is concerned with how socially liberated structures and institutions are in reality merely extensions of the patriarchal bureaucracy that they were conceived to supplant.
Avere vent’anni is as politically conservative and blunt as the cop and gangster protagonists of Di Leo’s poliziotteschi pictures. Although the pessimistic social critiques of hippie communes and Rome’s narcotics division may seem to advocate reform, the images that tell this story and present these ideas are complicit in the sexualization and oppression of the two protagonists (Gloria Guida and Lilli Carati). Avere vent’anni is a film that fetishizes physical violence against women just as it sexualizes their bodies.
The “uncut” version of Avere vent’anni, which is Di Leo’s original edit, sees this misogynist operation through to a rather bitter end. The international edit of Avere vent’anni restructures the film entirely omitting the final scene and changing much of the dialogue in dubbing. Di Leo’s “uncut” version follows the two girls from a beach to a commune (where the bulk of the film plays out) to a terrible gang-rape in the woods. The central visual metaphor of Avere vent’anni is the image of an angry, well-dressed man inserting a tree branch into the sex organ of Carati.
The duo of liberated feminist spirits must, in the social economy of Di Leo’s film, be punished for assuming the degree of agency typically reserved for men. Throughout the film the two women are abused, humiliated and assaulted but they always punch back in retaliation, true to grindhouse form. The ultimate scene is the punishment; a condensing of I Spit On Your Grave‘s (1979) prolonged scenes of sex as torture porn into a three-minute burst of unbridled sadism.
Italian genre films of this era are notoriously misogynistic and a majority of them are not for the faint of heart. Avere vent’anni is an extreme example of this. Ironically the more disturbing “uncut” version of Avere vent’anni makes more sense narratively as well as technically. Avere vent’anni was conceived as innocence descending into Hell, so the inverted structure of the International cut makes absolutely no sense at all. To see Avere vent’anni is to watch Di Leo’s version.
