The film's notorious scene was the suggestion of Massimo Fagioli, Bellocchio's psychoanalyst and regular creative collaborator, who received a dedication in the credits. Maruschka Detmers, the Dutch actress who had previously appeared in Godard's Detective, later said the scene had overshadowed everything else she had ever done. She was not wrong.

Il diavolo in corpo (1986) - DEVIL IN THE FLESH - was described as the first major film in recent memory in which a well-known mainstream actress performed an unsimulated sex act on screen.

The film was made by Marco Bellocchio, one of Italian cinema's most enduring and uncompromising directors, the man who made Fists in the Pocket in 1965 and is still making vital, award-winning films six decades later. The cinematographer was Giuseppe Lanci, who had shot films for Andrei Tarkovsky.

Raymond Radiguet's 1923 novel had already been adapted once, in 1947 by Claude Autant-Lara, with Gérard Philipe, in a film that caused a scandal by treating a wartime adulterous affair from the adulterer's perspective without moral condemnation.

Bellocchio's version updates the story to contemporary Italy, swaps the wartime husband for a jailed Red Brigades terrorist, and adds a scene that was not in the script.

The film's political context - the anni di piombo, the years of lead, the period of left-wing terrorism and political violence that had convulsed Italy through the 1970s and into the 1980s - gives the love story a weight that the 1947 version, for all its qualities, could not have.

Giulia's fiancé is in prison for terrorist activity. Her father was killed by terrorism. She is suspended between these facts and her own psychological unravelling when she encounters Andrea, a high school student who follows her on his moped from the courtroom.

The film exists in both an R-rated and an uncut version. Detmers is extraordinary in it regardless of which cut you watch, a magnetic and deliberately destabilizing presence.