1993, Italy/France/Hungary
Original title: Vortice mortale
Following up tangentially on the home appliance theme set in motion by his 1988 killer-phone thriller Dial: Help, this absurd sleazefest features three neurotic, manipulative sisters who live in a house together in post-Eastern bloc Budapest, and whose washing machine is at the centre of a convoluted murder investigation.
The antagonistic yet co-dependent relationship between the sisters Vida (Kashia Figura), Ludmilla (Barbara Ricci) and Maria aka ‘Sissy’ (Ilaria Borrelli) is established in the opening sex scene between the busty Vida and her pimp/ boyfriend Yuri (Yorgo Voyagis of Garter Colt), which takes place in the open doorway of a refrigerator (perhaps riffing on 9 1/2 Weeks) while Ludmilla looks on from the spiral staircase above, with her legs spread and clanging on an orchestra triangle (she’s a percussionist in a local orchestra but otherwise this makes no sense).
This scene also sets up how preposterous the next hour and a half will be, offering up a catalogue of sex scenes in similarly awkward places with all the cheesy eroticism of a bad ’80s music video (Gino Vannelli’s Black Cars comes to mind).
When Ludmilla discovers Yuri’s dismembered body in the washing machine later that night, the police are called, and they send over Inspector Alexander Stacev (Philippe Caroit of Max Pécas’s sex comedy Deux enfoirés à Saint-Tropez); but when he arrives there is no corpse and no trace of a crime.
“So we wasted all this time on the hallucinations of an alcoholic”, says Stave’s partner Nikolai, referring to Ludmilla, the alleged drunk of the family (though her alcoholism is talked about more than seen).
According to the two younger sisters, Yuri was really in love with Sissy, which could have prompted Vida to fly into a jealous homicidal rage.
But with no body, Stacev is inclined to walk away from any further investigation.
“I’m not wasting my time over childish rivalry!” he tells Ludmilla sternly. But he will, and so will we.
Stacev’s ineffectual investigation leads him to bed all three sisters in succession after their various hilarious acts of seduction (Ludmilla throws a salad on his crotch to get attention, Vida handcuffs him in a stairwell and Sissy makes out with him in a room full of blind people).
When his grouchy girlfriend Irina confronts him about his infidelities, he accidentally punches her in the face before proclaiming, “Irina, I don’t have a lover – I have three! And each is more deranged than the next! They’re sucking the life out of me!!”
That the girls are sexually ostentatious and emotionally inconsistent is certain, but the lack of psychological investigation presents them more as villainous succubi, who may have ‘invented’ the corpse in the washing machine as a means of ensnaring a new sex slave to fuel their interpersonal competition.
The Washing Machine is so over-the-top ridiculous that I must confess I spent days researching it afterward to determine whether the seemingly superficial flourishes were in fact secret codes that I was too stupid to grasp. In the end, I’m still at a loss.
hexafu 