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Somewhere in fairy tale land: Candido (Christopher Brown) is pretty
much the most mild-mannered and naive guy there is, and when Cunegonda
(Michelle Miller), the daughter of the Baron (Gianfranco D'Angelo),
seduces him, he thinks nothing of it ... until her father catches him and
chases Candido off the court.
By some unfortunate coincidence, Candido crosses path with the Prussian
army, circa 18th century, and is tricked into joining them, as a new pilot
of the air force (!) - which means he has to jump off a cliff with angel
wings.
War breaks out and destroys pretty much everything, but on the ruins of
what once was, Candido meets Professor Panglos (Jacques Herlin), the
wiseman of the Baron's court (and Greek choir of the movie), who
tells him that the Baron's palace have been attacked and he and his wife
have been killed - but Cunegonda was, after being raped 127 times,
abducted to God knows where ...
Eventually, Candido finds the love of his life, but finds out that she
is now the mistress of not one but four men - and when he tries to have
sex with her, he is caught by all four and chased off. Cunegonda though
makes an escape herself, to modern day New York. When Candido finally
makes it there himself, he finds a world reduced to product placement,
with Cunegonda on every billboard promising the best of all possible
orgasms, but she herself has long since taken off to Ireland, a land
torn by civil war.
Candido doesn't find Cunegonda in Ireland, nor in war-torn Palestinia,
where he looks for her next. It's ojly in the flower children's world of
nothing somewhere next to nowhere in the desert that he picks up her trail
again, and he finds her with a weird oracle that seems to know all the
answers - but doesn't talk all that much - and when it talks it's rather
rude ...
Finally, Candido travels to his own past - and sees himself about to be
seduced by Cunegonda ... and even though he now should know better, he
seems to be hell-bent on making the same mistakes again ... because, as
Professor Panglos always says, this is the best of all possible worlds,
and everythign happens for a cause.
By and large, directors Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti are
notorious for having invented the mondo genre in the 1960's
with their Mondo Cane-series, a series of violent
(pseudo-)documentaries made primarily to shock audiences. This is one of
their rare excursions into fiction (at least as a team) - and wouldn't you
know it, Mondo Candido, a bizarre mixture of fairy tale, social
satire and sexploitation based on a novel by none other than Voltaire is
quite a remarkable film, a nihilistic and pessimistic plot disguised as a
biting commentary on humandkind as such full of surreal images, black
humour and absurd ideas, all held together by a coherent direction,
beautiful camerawork and the undeniable will to entertain, despite the
film's dark subtext.
Maybe this film is nothing for the squeamish or the politically correct
crowd, but for everyone else, this one is most definitely recommended !
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find Mondo Candido at adultvideouniverse.com
