Both the original 1921 novel by Raymond Radiguet and the first film version by Claude Autant-Lara in 1946—featuring a teenage boy’s affair with a the wife of a French soldier at war—were scandalous for their frank and seditious treatment of sex and politics. Relocating the story to modern-day Italy, Bellocchio maintained the shock value by featuring explicit sexual content—lensed by Tarkovsky cinematographer Guiseppe Lanci—and integrated a more contemporary political complexity. Weakly attempting to reign in her voracious desires and a deep psychological dissonance, the beautiful, reckless Giulia seems as imprisoned as her fiancé—whose terrorist actions contributed to his arrest as well as the death of Giulia’s father—by the circumscriptions of a privileged life. While her fiancé renounces his beliefs in order to live a “normal” life, and her psychoanalyst simply diagnoses her as “crazy,” a new young lover finally promises an honest, unconditional expression of love—its own form of radical rebellion. Upon the film’s release, its raw eroticism threatened to overwhelm the subtler psychological entanglements which come to fully unravel by the film’s quietly revelatory close.