'Lovers': An oversexed diversion

By Donna Chernin

"Lovers and Other Relatives" is a tale about adultery with a moral message: If you're having an affair, at least keep it in the family.

This mildly amusing Italian sex farce stars the luscious actress Laura Antonelli as a young bride who becomes involved in incest-onceremoved.

In the film, her virile husband drops her off at his parents' home while he bandies about the countryside on business for a week at a time. The husband instructs his teen-aged brother Sandrino to babysit for his wife. "She's lost without me," he tells the boy.

Now Sandrino has ripened to the point where his sex drive, glands and curiosity are racing way past his experience. He and his two

buddies amuse themselves with countless pranks.

When Sandrino's sister-in-law Laura parades about the beach in her bathing suit and slinks around the house in her robe, the boy begins to smoulder in frustation. When Laura asks him to rub suntan lotion all over her bare back and tells him not to look at her while she bathes in the nude, he can no longer contain himself.

The most humorous moments occur when Sandrino attempts to confess his disloyal intentions to his older brother, who is so dense that he never understands. The husband is pleased that his kid brother is in passionate pursuit of a married woman and offers him advice, never suspecting that his own wife is the object of Sandrino's lust.

The movie also features some entertaining

scenes with Sandrino's high-strung father who repeatedly tries to murder his wife's obnoxious mongrel dog. In between his outbursts of temper, the father tries to curb his increasing suspicions that Sandrino is a homosexual.

Once the family learns that Sandrino has become a "full-fledged" man, each member celebrates the occasion for comically different

reasons.

"Lovers and Other Relatives" offers rather mindless diversion, but its main problem is that it is obsessed with sex.

Like Sandrino and his two buddies, the film can't seem to think of anything else but affairs of the bedroom, and after a while it wears itself out and makes you more sleepy than stimulated.

7

Rated Adult for sex and swearing.

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