Unknown filmmaker | Adulterous Scratches / 1999 [commercial advertisement]

ménage à trois

by Douglas Messerli

 

Unknown director Adulterous Scratches / 1999 [commercial advertisement]

 

In a short ad clearly influenced by the films of Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini, a beautiful woman, dressed in an open-collared tuxedo, descends the grand staircase to the lobby of a deluxe hotel, photographers snapping her photograph as she descends. She moves off into the hotel bar, lined with paintings by or copies of works by the Polish bisexual Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka.

    She moves to a high table facing a fashionable late 1930s attired woman who faces a handsome man.

  The celebrity orders a Campari and gently taps her stiletto-like fingernails against the glass. The gentleman grabs his shoulder revealing a set of scratches on his neck. Immediately the woman sitting across from him rises, goes to the man and grabs him by his collar which further reveals the nail marks. She thrusts the rest of her drink into his face and seductively saunters over to the woman, revealing on her hand the same set of nail marks.

    The two women, a bottle of Campari between them, stare over at the startled man, who standing now realizes that the women are perhaps more deeply in involved than he is with either of them.

    It’s sex so very Italian, so Campari, so classy.

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).