A big ripe hunk of Spanish cheese, the handsomely mounted but largely vacant bodice-ripper Mad Love suggests that revisionist feminist history, softcore pornography, and Harlequin-style romance need not be mutually exclusive. Based on the largely cursed life of Spanish monarch Joan of Castille (played as a young woman by Pilar López de Ayala), Mad Love opens with its protagonist still mourning the loss of her one great love decades after his untimely death. The film then moves back to her heady youth, when she was promised to a fellow (Daniele Liotti) whose dashing good looks earned him the sobriquet Philip The Handsome. The couple's marriage of political convenience develops into an affair of white-hot passion, as they consummate their union almost immediately and engage in a hedonistic lifestyle that suggests the sexual revolution came centuries early in their court. Though a notorious womanizer, Liotti is never comfortable with his wife's sexual hunger and passionate behavior, and treats her with judgmental coldness bordering on cruelty. He shuns his wife even as he spreads his seed across Europe, eventually becoming intimately involved with a frequently unclothed belly-dancing Moorish Satan-worshipper with sinister designs on him. For de Ayala, love is inseparable from hatred, which leads her to worship Liotti even after he conspires to strip her of her crown and have her declared mad. Mad Love is most engaging when it explores how the personal collides with the political, particularly how de Ayala's fevered, overdramatic sense of romance and contempt for conformity lead to her being judged as insane. The film clearly wants to expose the vicious double standard that condemned its heroine to a life of loneliness and despair, but it gets too bogged down in trashy melodrama to make a coherent or persuasive case. When de Ayala is reminded late in the film, for example, that her people are starving, it marks Mad Love's first real indication that the queen's duties involve more than obsessing over her husband's overactive genitals. Mad Love focuses too heavily on Liotti, who seems far too facile to inspire such intense emotions. The film bears all the signifiers of art—elaborate costumes and sets, a subject of historical importance, a voice-of-authority narrator unleashing a torrent of names and dates—but at heart it's a randy, oversexed soap opera in period garb.