The Magic Purse is another technically brilliant "period" film from Lupus, with perfect light, camera, sound, period wardrobe, locations indoors and outdoors. The three girls whipped are young beauties, very attractive especially for those who favour slim girls. The main whipping event, 10 minutes at the end of the film when the two blondes get 50 hard lashes each, is one of the best switch whippings I have seen.
So: Recommended!
But before we get to that, script writers I.T. Miller and Thomas J. Marco (this time not Pavel Stastny) and director Zbysek Podhajsky take us through yet another silly comedy, typical for Lupus, with caricatured over acting and clowny gestures.
A soldier, (Pavel Stastny), comes home from war, penniless. In the woods he meets a raggy, bearded beggar character, a magician (Lars Moebius). The soldier shares his last pieces of bread with him, and is rewarded with the gift of a magic purse. Whoever puts his fingers into this purse will each time find a gold coin. Soldier later reaches a farmhouse where he asks for a meal and a bed. Farmer and wife (Master Trautenberk and Teresa Tomaskova) say no, but when soldier picks out a few gold coins, food and beer gets on the table, and they provide a bed for the night. Soldier in bed, one of the farmer's daughter comes in and starts to seduce him, while the other daughter robs him of the purse (Vendula Steinova and Maria Kralova). Soldier curses when girl leaves with an insult and no sex.
The farm maid (Michaela Trmotova) has overheard the girls plotting, and tells her master. Punished for lying and told to keep her moth shut she is tied naked and whipped on her buttocks with a short single tail whip. A moderate but firm whipping - some 50 strokes leave pink stripes.
The soldier claiming he was robbed gets kicked out, but plots for revenge when he meets again with the beggar, who gives him some magic apples. In a disguise, he approaches the naughty girls and makes them believe that eating the apples they will soon find husbands. Instead, cow horns grow on their heads. The beggar provides the soldier with yet another silly disguise, this time as a magic arabic doctor with funny glasses, who serves the unhappy girls a medicine to get rid of the horns. But alas, this fake medicine doesn't work, and our doctor knows why: they have been naughty and must confess and be properly punished for the medicine to work.
So at long last they get tied naked to saw horses in the courtyard, and our soldier/magic doctor proceeds to whip them.
Which he does rather well!
Those lashes, about 50 for each girl, leaving their buttocks and hips marked with red and purple stripes, must have stung considerably. Several whippy and juicy switches are worn out on the girls' naked skin. There is, as one would expect, a lot of twisting and turning (quite sexy actually), and some "oow" and "aii" and "please" shouted, but they take it surprisingly well, considering the vigor of the strokes and the deep colours of the emerging stripes. Brave actresses!
My personal opinion of the Lupus comedy style in this film: it doesn't match a good Hollywood comedy, and maybe it doesn't want to. But it doesn't either have the strange and enigmatic under tones I have seen in Czech films, such as for instance The Jester and the Queen some years ago where Chantal Poullain is a brilliant domina-queen in an enchanting fairy tale. I don't know what a Czech audience thinks of the Lupus comedy, but for me such silly clownery reminds me more of junior high school amateur theater. And it distracts from the erotic emotions evoked by the (wonderful!) floggings.
Oh if Lupus had rather spent the first 30 minutes of the film showing the daughters and the maid toiling in the fields!
