So, after all, the 1980s were a nightmare in which you step into a shower at the invitation of a beautiful naked girl and, passing through the dense steam, you find yourself, three hours later, in the admissions exam room for college, which you obviously fail, and thus goodbye Princeton, goodbye glory, and goodbye money. Then the nightmare takes, let’s say, a more satisfying libidinal turn, leading an 18-year-old with Tom Cruise’s fresh smile to lose his virginity passionately, and then, through a series of improbable events, to find himself an apprentice pimp, who within 24 hours transforms the beautiful white colonial house (in Chicago!), left empty by his vacationing parents, into a brothel. These parents seem like the bewildered echo of Benjamin’s in The Graduate, while fragments of future films of the decade, such as Into the Night or Something Wild, whistle throughout the dreamlike, hormonal arc of the story. Here and there the memory goes back to that genuine masterpiece about the loss of American innocence, American Graffiti.
Luxury, capital, mafia, sex, and even the Ivy League touch each other, rub together, and intertwine roughly here, while visual metaphors abound. The love scene on the last metro has a shade of adolescent softcore, with Phil Collins creating an island of languor in the soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. So the 1980s produced in Risky Business a nightmare that corrupted and debunked many fashionable values, and the fake happy ending does not hide its consistent cynicism. But there were those who knew how to survive that nightmare, as demonstrated by the memorable scene where Cruise, in his underwear, celebrates his parents’ departure with a wild rock performance in which everything – his dazzling teeth, the part in his hair, his nice bare thighs – made it clear that a star was born. The entrance of a remarkable actor who, knowing how to age that fabulous smile, would withstand the impact of many decades, dream stories, and missions: impossible.

Paola Cristalli