Shortly prior to the grand unveiling — more of a disrobing, really — of the long-in-the-making Ultimate Cut of the 1979 pornographic epic Caligula at the Cannes Film Festival, a programmer with the Classics section addressed the crowd gathered in the Salle Buñuel. Back in the States, we’d probably categorize his brief speech as a “trigger warning,” though in the comparatively wokisme-resistant France, he sounded more like he was running through an a la carte menu of depravities: orgies, as was par for the course in those heady days of the Roman Empire’s cataclysmic twilight, but also incest, bestiality, a double rape, a variety of physical deformities, a jaw-dropping prosthetic-SFX childbirth, and one instance of fisting. Upon announcing that last one, the audience burst into a round of applause. Let no one deny that one of the most ardently reviled films ever made offers a little something for everybody.

Creative jack-of-all-trades Thomas Negovan’s herculean efforts, a three-year process during which he sifted through 96 hours of preserved footage from the notorious original shoot, have elevated the carnal carnival to its originally intended glory. The initially enlisted screenwriter Gore Vidal envisioned a profane political satire on the speed and intensity with which unchecked power corrupts, a decadent sin-a-palooza addressing an America at the tail end of the indulgent, onanistic “Me Decade.” As explained by a series of title cards tacked onto the new-and-drastically-improved edit, producer and Penthouse founder Bob Guccione ran roughshod over Vidal’s script, just the beginning of a shitshow production that saw all major creative personnel either quit, get fired, or be physically barred from entering the set. Concerned about earning potential, Guccione shot and inserted additional passages of hardcore penetration not fully excised by Negovan, but scaled back to make room for the substance of the story. As masturbation fodder, it’s not very good, the wide-shot cinematography and noxious lecher vibes both killing any sense of intimacy, passion, or even simple pleasure. As cinema, however, there’s plenty to be said for the motion picture once declared a “moral holocaust” in the pages of Variety.

Vidal adhered to the soup-to-exposed-nuts model of the biopic, tracing the arc of a young Gaius Germanicus (nicknamed Caligula after the “little boots” he wore while growing up on the military front with his general papa, and played with delectable high-camp hamminess by Malcolm McDowell) as he rises through the ranks and descends into a hell of his own making. Introduced having a barely-clothed canoodle in bed with his sister Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy), the emperor-to-be appears to us first as a relatively gentler soul than his despotic destiny would suggest. When he visits his great-uncle Tiberius (Peter O’Toole, having a ball), he can’t recognize the demented, profligate, venereal-disease-sore-covered reprobate as a dark vision of his own future — though who can blame him, what with the waves of supple flesh undulating as courtesans leap into an Olympian swimming pool. It won’t be long before Caligula has set off down this bleak path toward a familiar endpoint; time has enriched the portraiture in that viewers can now appreciate a distinct Trumpiness to ol’ Caligs as he comes to treat his domain as personal piggy bank, source of abusive amusement, and venue to flex his bullying authority. 

It’s been long enough since my last viewing of the original cut that I won’t bother enumerating the newly made alterations, with the exception of a flimsy-looking animated credit sequence that clashes with the staggering opulence that follows. Squeezing in right at the end of Hollywood’s period of auteur-driven permissiveness, one year before its wrongfully-maligned kindred Heaven’s Gate killed it dead, the film shares the insatiable hunger of its subject for more, more, more. Initial director Tinto Brass, called in after John Huston and Lina Wertmüller politely declined, understood that the scope of the revelry scenes had to live up the infamously lavish reputation of the crumbling civilization in which they were set. In some cases, the most over-the-top set pieces were actual pieces on the set: spinning plates miraculously holding themselves up, an indoor ship with rowing oars that carry it nowhere, a gargantuan contraption of spinning razors that functions like a lawnmower meant for decapitation. Production designer Danilo Donati was encouraged to go nuts in codifying the overall aesthetic, a directive he took fully to heart, splaying a ravishing rainbow of lurid color all over the costumes and walls. Guccione wanted his magnum opus to rival Citizen Kane, and maybe it does, if not on greatness, then on its own insistent significance. 

As long as movies have streamed, the original Caligula has been unavailable, presumably due to online platforms’ reluctance to host graphic, unsimulated sexual content. (For the time being, “the Netflix of porn” remains an impossible dream.) Between Negovan’s handsome restoration and the long-overdue critical reassessment that could and should come with it, that may soon change. But if it does, if the holy grail of art-smut infiltrates our living rooms and laptops, something essential will be lost along the way as we relinquish the communal viewing experience. The air crackles with a quivering charge of tension when people get together to watch a dirty pitcher, a feeling of camaraderie that took hold in the Buñuel even before a few dozen cowards walked out. (What were they expecting?) The screening transported its attendees back to the golden era when a widespread architecture of exhibition still existed for movies like this, that is to say, a genre like any other. We leave our homes and pay ever-climbing ticket prices to share in something meaningful with strangers, our gasps and laughter only made stronger by extreme content. The filth connoisseurs among the Cannes press corps came together — not like that, get your head out of the gutter — as one moviegoing nation, under a half-naked Helen Mirren, indivisible, with degeneracy and perversion for all. 

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.