Monday | June 15, 2015 7:00 pm

Sweet Deceptions
(I dolci inganni)

Screening on Film

Directed by Alberto Lattuada.
With Christian Marquand, Catherine Spaak, Jean Sorel.
Italy/France, 1960, 35mm, black & white, 95 min.
Italian with English subtitles.
Print source: Cineteca di Bologna

Sweet Deceptions manages a fragile blend of innocence and experience reminiscent of the European New Waves just beginning in 1960. The film follows one day in the life of a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl whose sexual awakening leads her to pursue a family friend twenty years her senior. The coming-of-age of a young woman was subject matter that director Alberto Lattuada would return to repeatedly in the future. Sweet Deceptions was daring enough to be briefly censored; parallel to the schoolgirl’s story is a subplot involving a boy her age who is kept by an older woman. Seen today, the film’s balance of frankness and delicacy feels startlingly fresh.