The Sex of Angels 1968

On a sun-washed Italian summer, Nora Doris Kunstmann, an heiress at odds with her father, welcomes her friends Nancy Rosemary Dexter and Carla Laura Troschel for a carefree break. The plan is audacious and impulsive: hijack her father’s yacht and steer toward the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, all without asking permission. When Nora’s boyfriend declines to join, the trio resolves to find a desirable man with no serious attachments to accompany them. At a lively dance club, they encounter Marco Bernard De Vries, a medical student who has a casual girlfriend but agrees to meet Nancy the next day for a swim. The idea of steering away from ordinary rules gives the night a reckless edge, and before long the three women have arranged to abduct Marco onto the waiting yacht.

Marco initially greets the sudden change of plans with a blend of amusement and curiosity, moving from one interest to another as he tries to charm each woman. He discovers that Nancy’s feelings are not straightforward—she may be lesbian, bisexual, or even frigid by some accounts—while Carla is clearly attracted to women and largely uninterested in him. Nora, meanwhile, speaks of saving her virtue for a black man, a detail that adds a complicated layer to the group dynamics. The mood aboard shifts from flirtation to something colder and more calculating as the women carry out their plan under a veneer of casual camaraderie. The tensions simmer beneath the surface as the yacht leaves Italy’s shore and glides toward unfamiliar waters.

Once they reach Croatian waters and face a compulsory inspection, Marco—unaccustomed to traveling without a passport or clothes—must hide while the authorities board the yacht. The patrol passes, and the women’s façade remains intact for the moment. But the air of secrecy thickens when they reveal their true intention: to experiment with LSD and to tape the trip, hoping to remember details later even if memory fails them. They dose themselves with sugar cubes laced with the drug and surrender to the ensuing delirium, each moment recorded in their own private script as they drift into altered perceptions.

The morning after, the mood has shifted from revelry to pain. Nora endures physical distress, and Marco wakes to find Nancy and Carla together in bed. He realizes he has been shot; the bullet is lodged in his chest, not bleeding but threatening a tenuous life. The women remember almost nothing and hesitate to revisit the taped session, with Nancy insisting the device remain hidden to avoid blame. They pull into a port to seek morphine for Marco, but the druggist resists without a prescription and refuses to trade the medicine for sex. Carla volunteers that she is a virgin, and the pharmacist relents, offering the morphine in exchange for a chance to help a young woman in distress.

Back aboard, Carla shows compassion for Marco, urging her friends to turn the yacht toward Italy and get him real medical care. But fear of arrest or harsher consequences makes the two companions slow to act, effectively obstructing any quick rescue. As Marco weakens, the effort to secure help falters, and his condition worsens with every hour they delay.

Eventually Marco dies, and the decision is made to listen to the taped record of what happened during the LSD trip. When they discover the tape is blank, Carla deduces that Nancy deliberately withheld the microphone, sabotaging any chance to reconstruct the events. With the body of their companion adrift in an inflatable dinghy, the trio returns to shore and tries to resume their ordinary lives, putting on brave faces as if nothing has changed. Yet the strain of the experience has already fractured the fragile bond they shared, revealing just how fragile trust can be under pressure.

In the aftermath, Carla abandons Nora and Nancy, running to the end of a pier before, after a moment of contemplation, she steps into the water and drowns herself. The film closes on a stark note: what began as a reckless escape ends in tragedy, and the consequences of their choices linger in the wake of the voyage.