Directed by: Radley Metzger
Stars: Carol Levy, Victor Bevine, Shannah Hall
Language: English
Country: Usa | Imdb Info
Description: Audrey Swallow is a wealthy, conservative New York socialite preparing for marriage and the carefully arranged future expected of her. Lucy Darling is her former school friend, physical double, and complete opposite: worldly, impulsive, and employed as an expensive companion to wealthy clients.
When Lucy finds herself committed to two engagements in different places at the same time, she proposes an outrageous solution. Audrey will travel to Monaco in her place, while Lucy remains in New York and temporarily assumes Audrey’s identity.
Audrey agrees without fully understanding what Lucy’s work involves.
Arriving in Monaco, she expects a sophisticated weekend of polite conversation, cocktails, and social entertaining. Instead, she discovers that Lucy’s clients expect a far more intimate form of companionship. Initially shocked, Audrey is forced to improvise her way through a world governed by confidence, fantasy, and carefully negotiated appearances.
Back in Manhattan, Lucy faces the opposite challenge. She must imitate Audrey’s restraint and respectability at an elegant engagement celebration. But Lucy’s instincts, wardrobe, and complete disregard for upper-class convention make it difficult to maintain the illusion. Her attempt to perform innocence becomes just as disruptive as Audrey’s attempt to perform experience.
As both women move deeper into each other’s lives, the exchange becomes more than a practical joke. Audrey begins questioning whether her respectable future is truly the life she wants, while Lucy discovers that wealth and social approval come with their own rules, performances, and restrictions.
The Princess and the Call Girl turns the familiar double-identity plot into a playful adult comedy about class, freedom, and self-invention. New York respectability and Monaco decadence become two sides of the same theatrical world, each requiring its women to play a role for the benefit of others.
Legacy Note:
Written and directed by Radley Metzger, the film adapts Pierre Serbie’s Frontispiece into an erotic variation on The Prince and the Pauper. Instead of royalty and poverty, Metzger contrasts the controlled life of an affluent bride-to-be with the apparent freedom of a professional companion.
Carol Levy carries the film in the dual roles of Audrey and Lucy, distinguishing the women through posture, speech, clothing, and attitude. Audrey’s nervous refinement and Lucy’s casual confidence allow the identity-switch premise to work even when the comedy becomes deliberately broad.
The film lacks the visual elegance and psychological complexity of Metzger landmarks such as Camille 2000, The Lickerish Quartet, and The Opening of Misty Beethoven, but it retains his interest in sophisticated games, shifting identities, sexual performance, and the unstable line between liberation and role-playing.
As one of Metzger’s final released features, The Princess and the Call Girl serves as a light, cheerfully artificial epilogue to his career in erotic cinema. It is a glossy fantasy in which two women borrow each other’s identities and discover that respectable society and forbidden pleasure are both elaborate stages — and neither life is quite as simple as it appears from the outside.
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