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The Important Thing is not to Draw Attention to Yourself.
At the end of the 1970’s, fifteen years before "Priscilla" brought drag culture to the notice of the general public, the Italian television network was showing a cult trio introduced by Arbore (a popular Italian variety performer). Their notoriety and popularity on stage and television continued for several years. They were the glorious Sorelle Bandiera ("The Flag Sisters") -- Tito le Duc / "the Blonde", already very famous, see Salon Kitty; Mauro Bronchi / "the Brunette", and Neil Red Hansen / "the Redhead", three self-confident and pleasing singers wearing feminine clothing.
To build on their success on the small screen, they decided to make a cinema film, and the result is this film. Following a cartoon clip with the faces of the Sisters, the film opens with a Soviet soldier, posted on the bank of a river. He sees O’Hara (Nazareno Zamperla, brother of the famous Giuliano Gemma), an American agent on a floating island, in the act of transmitting a secret message. He eventually kills him after several misses.
However the American radio continues to transmit despite the explosion, and the Soviet agent kills himself, realising his mission has failed. Meanwhile the CIA is preparing Operation Matrioska, to send to Rome three top agents. However security in the CIA is pretty poor, and the numerous agents involved in preparing the plan know all the details.
The action now moves to an Italian beach, where Agent K (Peter Boom) blows up a fake crab, resulting in the surfacing of a submarine, from which the Flag Sisters emerge. They are perfectly outfitted in wetsuits adorned with the stars and stripes. The three take off the wetsuits, and voilà, they are properly dressed in drag, perfectly made up, with bows in their hair and suspenders!! With a determined - and perhaps rather masculine - manner, they advance up the beach, to improvise a short musical number and a little comic routine nonsense, but a small group of hippies, three men and a woman, are passing, and they are overcome by lust for the three and decide on some sexual abuse– but is this a spy story or a lesbian fantasy?!! Anyway it ends with a knockout.
So, maybe a bit exhausted from their exertions or from emotion, the three are resting on a fallen tree, and one says to the other, "We got the better of them", and that becomes the theme song for the trio! So, it’s back to the mission and they contact HQ using a radio in a lipstick, the Sisters get orders to find the "Man with the Secret Matrioska (Russian nesting dolls)". However, the Soviet spies are always on the alert, and a shady character, Romanoff, with eyelashes hiding a miniature camera, and his female colleague, decide to follow our girls. Without losing time, they arrive in a luxury hotel to start their own mission, and we now find out their names: "Petulia" (not particularly surprising), "Glenda" and "Dorothy" (!). The names make us suspect that the scriptwriter had his own agenda and wanted to suggest a hidden message to the audience.
However, like Boy George, entering in the Soho Club and the sports centre in the video of "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me", he created a lot of confusion, because the Sisters’ beauty results in the collapse of a rugby scrum!!! But it is time for a dramatic scene: in a private room, the three take off their feminine clothing, and put on their male clothes, to the confusion of the spies.
The Soviet spies, Irina (Maria Buccella Grace), Tatiana (Laura Trotter) and Sonia (Marilda Donà), three attractive women, waste no time, and they check into the same hotel, and in fact get an adjacent room. Here Irina gets one of the best lines in the film: she gives an egg to a waiter/waitress and says, "I laid that; drink it with the hole!" (untranslatable joke?)
The girls from Russia stay but they are confused: they expected the men to try to seduce them. They are however trusting in the happened one of the own mission. Meanwhile our heroines search the hotel in the middle of the night, and following Glenda’s instruction, "Girls, in places like this the important thing is not to draw attention to yourself", so that striking costumes would have an adverse effect, they dress modestly, in the Spanish style, as an oriental girl, and in a French Belle Epoque outfit. The outfits come from Romanoff (Gianni Musy), who seems to have a plentiful supply.
Ferguson (Roberto Della Casa) arrives; he is their chief, and in a hypnotic tango with Glenda – the erotic tension is powerful!! – an exhibition disco dance with Dorothy and a waltz with Petulia, tells them that the man they are looking for, who has the secret, is in the hotel, and that is bald and he can be recognised by a tattoo on his wrist.
After changing their dresses – and WHAT dresses, with a giant bow in their hair - the Sisters behave like any respectable girls on the lookout for men, but the result of this search is negative. So after a final change of outfit, they take a look round the swimming pool, where they get into conversation with the Russian spies. However Glenda now gets called to the telephone: a man tells her that before dying, O’Hara left a parrot, and it had a document fastened to one leg, with a photo of the Bald man.
A persistent fly on the cheek of the speaker turns out to be a bomb when it explodes. They get hold of the parrot, but the photo is not clear. Back in male clothing, the heroines, continually disturbed by the annoying parrot, are playing cards when they get interrupted by a telephone call from Ferguson: he has decided to pay a visit himself. So they need to get out the make-up again, as they sing "Rimmel & Cipria" (an inspired song written by Enrica Bonaccorti!!), that leads in to a farce sequence of misunderstandings. First Ferguson and the Soviet spies introduce themselves, then the rugby players, perhaps under the influence of drugs, decide they are going to rape the Sisters.
Finally Ferguson says that he has a matrioska that belonged to O’Hara. The Soviet spies receive a telegram from Russia, instructing them to find the bald man within 24 hours. The Sisters, in fresh outfits, are trying to find the secret of the matrioska, with the parrot gagged to keep it quiet. But suddenly a bald man with a tattoo enters their room by mistake. It is Mr. Meat (Mr. Meat? What is the scriptwriter on? Luckily this isn’t a family film!) goes to the bar. The three have to follow, and as there is no time to change, they have to go out in male clothing. Mr. Meat asks Petulia to play the piano, and she encounters one of the Soviet spies, while Irina invites Mr. Meat to dance. The erotic games – if they can be called that – between the heroines and the spies become more obvious, and it looks like getting out of control. And disaster follows: Mr. Meat gets kidnapped. So now there is an extraordinary chase: first the Sisters are ahead, then the Russians, then our heroines again. Right in the middle of all this the Sisters find themselves on a stage during a revivalist religious meeting, and they are made to dance by the priest. Mr. Meat takes the opportunity to make good his escape. Romanoff finds out about Mr Meat and decides on a plan of action, but the Sisters find out about it. So as not to be recognised, they decide to follow the Soviet spies dressed as men, each of them following one spy. Meanwhile Glenda is called by an informer. He gives her an envelope that he says will certainly be of interest, but then he is killed by the now-familiar Moscow bomb.
So the Sisters, back in drag, get together and recover an x-ray, from which she turns out that Mr. Meat has a miniaturised secret document hidden in a tooth. Constantly shadowed by the spies, the three go to a clinic and, while they are looking for Mr. Meat, they create chaos in a university lecture, where Petulia and a spy demonstrate mouth to mouth resuscitation on one another in another lesbo sequence! The Russians capture Mr. Meat and start to extract his teeth, but the Sisters overcome them and they recover the tooth with the cap. So the secret is finally revealed: a message in code containing information of fundamental importance for mankind was encapsulated in the tooth of a nobody insignificant man who had to endure the extraction in a clinic.
The sisters, happy and dressed in white red and green (the national colours of Italy) leave by plane for Brazil, taking the loyal parrot with them, swearing that they would never again be dressed as women. But the stewards, in a daring exchange of roles, reveal themselves to be the transvestite Russian spies, and they seize the incriminating tooth. The Sisters are going to be forced by the spies to jump out of the plane, but suddenly a Chinese man appears from nowhere and saves them, and in an unexpected dramatic turn of events, is carried off by a thieving magpie. A gust of wind reveals the disguise to the agents, and they recognise one another and embrace.
The film finishes with a triple wedding, immortalised by Mr. Meat. The parts of the bride and the groom are but interchangeable, and in a final scene the Sisters wear unlikely wedding dresses, while they dance to a frenetic conga. In spite of our support for the Flag Sisters, nothing positive can be said about this crazy jumble: the chaotic story, the daft script (one of the Russians says "pig trojka"), the bad acting, the embarrassing dialogues, the incredibility of the plot and the silly ending.
The only saving grace is that the fashions worn by the three femmes fatales: a baroque triumph of peaks, plumes and sequins that outstrip the likes of Marie Antoinette or Wanda Osiris. Whatever, the cinematographic launch of the Sisters could have been achieved in various ways, but maybe the problem was just in the way in which the same thing is offered to the ordinary public, like drag next door, old aunts, reassuring and available, without the least reference and sexual implication and not even a veiled signal of impropriety.
We remember that across the Atlantic the version most people were familiar with was "scary’n’nasty" drag represented by Divine, where, with little suggestive themes like "Shoot Your Shot", it never went further than this on the screen. Of course this does not resolve the problems of this film, that drags on for nearly 90 minutes, threatening to turn the audience into zombies. For the Sisters it was a missed opportunity that might perhaps never arise again; for us it is a tedious time, relieved occasionally by the weird farce like the light reflecting from a sequin, too weak to illuminate the rest of the film.
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