song of songs

Stereotype an aunt:
Doting and protective? Or cruel and flirty with the customers. A drunk? A sourpuss?

Stereotype a virgin heroine:
Blonde and christian? Moral and lost? Aching to get out?

Lily and the aunt under whose eaves she has been marooned by the death of her last parent, are all of these things together. Though she's chided for talking to the handsome artist who wants her as his model, she's encouraged to date the commandante--in exchange for his imported Jamaican rum. Though she fears the phallis, Lily sneaks out every night to...model. For a man. Here, even before the code, a striptease is a hilariously dated litany of pans between Lily's clothed parts and the nude sculptures of those parts, studding the studio. All prodding pokes the question; what is art? What can be shown? What medium can show it? Still, it's back-to-basics hilarity when she's afraid to remove her last garment, and we see her, nakedly, for what she really is: a good girl, gone wild.

But her beautiful artist sneaks off with a deal after bedding her, and Lily beds the commandant, as well as his horse trainer--well, not really, that was a fire and blah blah blah. The plot sneaks around as much as she does, and basically--this is one of those oldies that's as laugh out loud then, as it is today. Though some of the laughs are unguarded, unthought--we laugh so hard, because we cannot imagine this ribaldrous a film could have been made this long ago. We know now not to trust our grandmothers, whose "In My Day..." sentences are a life awash in dreams. Song of Songs hangs those, and all dreams, to dry.