A darling girl, in prototype Slovak peasant garb, has been summoned. She has written an essay which has infuriated the Headmaster, and she will meet the fate frequently seen in this room. She must choose the cane the HM will use, an erotic touch found in CP genre. She seems sanguine about the impending caning, apparently proud of her journalism. She bends over the bench, but Pavel cannot properly strap her down and peel back her skirts to access her bottom because of her abundant clothing, so he releases her.
She must undress herself, sexy and erotic foreplay which will take some minutes. Floral headdress off, unlace the bodice, then remove one layer of voluminous petticoat-like underskirts after another, until finally she is down to simple bloomers and undershirt, frail helplessness compared to her proud native attire. Pavel straps her to the wood frame and we are ready to begin.
He opens her bloomers to expose a perfect pale bare bottom, so elegantly positioned by this bench. Slowly, he lays on 30 strokes. There is dialogue, some of it normal and some understandably hysterical. She begins surging at 10 strokes. Ominous welts at the halfway point.
At 30 strokes, Pavel switches to a thinner, more whippy cane, and the girl takes almost 30 more strokes. This has been long, slow, straightforward caning, conforming to Lupus standards--perfect angles, lovely tearful anguished facials, and a corduroyed bottom at the conclusuon.
This HM is a closet pervert-demon; we know he cherishes these office hearings. He gets out his camera and tripod and photographs the wreckage of her bottom for his collection. During these concluding scenes there are flashbacks to his youth, when he appears before another headmaster in this very room.
The maid has dressed and must kneel on the washboard in front of the crucifix for some brief penance before she is dismissed, a moment we enjoyed when other young tushes appeared here.
Unbridled Youth opens with the Headmaster wearily shaking his head over the peculiar grammar and idiom of an essay which has been handed in by one of his best pupils whose Czech is usually perfect. He does not yet realise that he is faced with an individual example of the nationalist fervour which frequently afflicted that polyglot amalgam of disparate nationalities, the Austro-Hungarian empire. It had been created centuries earlier for the sole purpose of turning back the Ottomans and their Turks. Now at the beginning of the 20th Century that threat has long disappeared and the natives are restless.
The young lady herself enters the room and gives a spirited defence of her political position, very well acted and spoken, but tantalisingly incomprehensible to those of us with nary a word of Czech or Slovak in our heads. Never mind, we see the canes in their usual place in the rack on the wall and know there is only one way this rebellion will be put down. Yet again Rigid East/Lupus Films have provided a totally original, but historically authentic, scenario against which the value of corporal punishment can be explicitly demonstrated. The girl herself is played by Marta Horvathova, a pretty young thing, decked out in a beautiful Slovak national costume (for finding, or making, which Alena Smutna of the Costume Department deserves an Oscar). When the girl is strapped into position over the punishment bench the Headmaster has to peel back a dozen underskirts, yet is still unable to uncover the target. She has to be released to remove the dress, slowly of course with all the unlacing to be done, but not in the least tedious to watch, and a steadying prelude to the application of the third thickest cane which is only minutes away. Back in position, the girl reveals a nicely rounded bottom upended ready for punishment, smooth, unblemished, and clearly a stranger to the lash.
Where do Rigid East/Lupus find such a steady supply of young women in need of a thrashing? There appear to be no "resident artistes", and only in Note for Absence and Catechism are we confronted with bottoms which are other than virgin (at any rate, with regard to corporal punishment). Perhaps they queue up for the fee and are reassured by the knowledge that, allowing for a little artistic licence with regard to the number of strokes, but not necessarily with regard to the overall severity, they will be treated no worse than real-life English and Irish schoolgirls (and their Commonwealth counterparts) who had their bottoms strapped and caned right up to the nineteen-eighties. In the present case 25 strokes with the thick cane are followed by 25 with a thinner whippier one which inevitably draws blood. Having demonstrated her acting abilities prior to the caning Marta Horvathova need now only be herself: her cries, protests, sighs, and grimaces are totally spontaneous and owe nothing to drama school. Like others however she survives to walk away, and kneel awhile on the scrubbing board, and leaves the room suitably chastened, once more an empire loyalist, and - except for a need to hold all those underskirts clear of her scarified and tender bottom - none the worse for her chastisement.
The film ends with the headmaster recalling his own rebellious youth as a student teacher. We see him fifty years earlier in flashback (in a suitably modified version of the room in which he himself now rules) being given a talking-to by his own headmaster, but he is not about to be given a caning: Rigid East/ Lupus Films have avoided that old cliché of the cp genre in which the "tables are turned" - whatever that means - and those who normally wield the cane etc are given a "taste of their own medicine". Instead to disillusion him of any silly ideas about the nobility of the peasants and their nationalist aspirations his old headmaster banishes him to a village school for two years. On his return he is resolved to become a pillar of the establishment, fierce in its support, with no qualms about correcting wayward youth with a short sharp shock. Thank God for the canes!
This latest offering in the series comes in at just under thirty minutes long, tightly edited like the first two films, and all the better for that, rendering the fast forward button redundant. For those with an interest in seeing a sound caning administered in an authentic setting backed by a believable story line, Unbridled Youth is certainly one to add to the collection.
UK REVIEWER
