Max, mon amour (1986, Nagisa Oshima)

Strange, strange film... I mean, what do you think about movie about love affair between middle-aged woman and real monkey? Real love affair, not Platonic love, or pet love but love, sexual love and passion? What is your opinion about that? Perhaps – "What a silly idea!" or "This is one of the stupidest things I ever heard about". You have right to think that and perceive that this is some trash movie or some –xploatation movie, but this is not that kind (for me). In fact, this is very European (in style and cast) movie from famous (and somewhere arrant) director Nagisa Oshima. You probably heard about his semi-pornographic art movie from 1976 - Ai no Corrida (english title is In the realm of senses) which contains some antological scenes like cutting the penis, explicit felatio and many, many more. So you see, this movie is not the biggest excess in his career. What was the most interesting and thought-provoking thing here was the feel of this movie. After first shock when you (and her husband) discover that she has a lover, but not of mankind, you'll (surprisingly) accept it as a fact and continue to watch this movie without any feeling of disgust or something wrong. This is because the accent was on love, not on physical attraction (although Oshima didnt's forget to stress it) between woman and hairy chimpanzee. And surprisingly, this film didn't descend into goofiness, although behaviour of husband of woman who fell in love into monkey is very questionable and doubtful because he didn't hate his rival and after time he accept that situation. Some critics understood this movie as some allegory on alienation and crisis of institution of marriage in upper European Burgeoisie, but I'm not sure that this was the real intention of Oshima. He and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere made fun and interesting movie about so unusual theme. I think that they just wanted to make subversive movie whose intention was not to shock audience with some "I don't believe it" images and scenes but to surprise viewers with their reactions, feelings and their accepting of romantic view at zoophilia.
This is one of the movies which is hard to rate: you can't say this is a masterpiece or something near to that but this is also not an average movie. I would rate it 7/10 although it looks too high and too low rating at same time.