Polanski's acting role is excellent, but the movie belongs to star Sydne Rome, a portrait of cluelessness with riotous blonde curls and a perfect streamlined 1970s figure who looks and acts remarkably like Farrah Fawcett as she wanders (mostly topless) through a host of bizarre situations. She escapes a trio of would-be rapists by seeking refuge in an Italian villa full of reproductions of the best of European erotic painting and a lot of crazy people. Since she doesn't speak Italian it's even more confusing. At times you think it's a bordello, at other times an asylum. Truth be told, there's no telling what this elegant mansion is.

Dream logic rules. Rome's clothes are stolen every time she falls asleep. There are peep-holes in the walls. Helmut Newton style nude amazon sunbathers drift across the veranda without a sound except the distant din from a constant game of ping pong. Mastroianni dons a tiger skin and capers about demanding that Rome whip him. A senile patriarch presides over bizarre dinners where everyone laughs at Rome to her face, though not speaking the language she'll never know why.

In this erotic comedy from famed director Roman Polanski, Sydne Rome stars as a very sexy and quite bewildered young hitchhiker. As the film opens, she has just escaped the clutches of three would be rapists only to find her way to a seaside villa. Things are, as she discovers, very strange at the villa. She is given a room and, within moments of undressing she is under the peeping eye of a hedonistic pervert, played with bravado by Marcello Mastroianni. She soon encounters the rest of the occupants of the mansion, all are completely anomalous and each tries to persuade into a sexual encounter. Throughout her entire erotic adventure, she carries a diary under her arm and writes curiously impersonal and un-erotic entries. This is the least discussed of Polanski's films, but on some levels it may be his most revealing.