Lina Wertmüller

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Film Reviews: 'The Lizards'

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[Like] so many of the current generation of Italian directors …, Lina Wertmüller is building on Italy's neorealist history [in The Lizards] and using as raw material the ambivalent face of a country that, in its infinitely varied sociology, is like a microcosm of the world. In the Italian cinema neorealism is no longer an idea but an instinct, an inherited gift that, coupled with a good script, can scarcely produce a bad film. It is not therefore as surprising as it would be anywhere else to find, in Italy, a new director who can perfectly evoke a way of life—especially when, like Lina Wertmüller, she can write her own quietly effective script. The Lizards … seems, in fact, so basically unassuming that it is very easy to fall into the error of regarding it as documentary instead of the very visual kind of drama that it is…. But Lina Wertmüller's personal contribution to a theme which at first glance seems very like that of I Vitelloni … is less marked in that to some extent she is still feeling her way. It is, however, enough to point to the sequence which begins with an elderly woman committing suicide because her daughter-in-law has ousted her authority in the home…. Nothing could be further from documentary than [the] succession of images [in this sequence], nor is it symbolic except for those who like to think in symbols. To see it is, quite simply, to feel what the director wants to convey. The method might be described as impressionistic, and it is one which demands a cameraman as sensitive to visual nuances as the director herself….

[The] camerawork always fits the mood. For the opening scenes at lunch and during siesta hour, the camera moves either in slow pans or not at all. When Francesco is making furtive advances to a peasant girl (it is the men and not the girls who fear being compromised), the camera enters joyfully into the spirit of intricate pursuit, swooping all over the place and catching the couple from every conceivable angle, including a fascinating vertical one; yet, in the manner of the south, its attention is easily distracted, so that even at the height of the chase it can turn away temporarily to tag on to a passer-by. All this exactly expresses the ephemeral enthusiasms of the south, for which Lina Wertmüller obviously has a kind of love-hate relationship. She shows, for instance, the bourgeois contempt for the peasantry and the claustrophobic class system as products not so much of viciousness as of the peasants' own rather disarming pride in being resigned to their inferior lot. Here nothing changes because no one has the energy to pursue anything wholeheartedly enough: flirtations with peasant girls always end in arranged marriages to someone like the chemist's fat and ugly daughter, and early ambitions are gently lulled to sleep. This is the mood for which Lina Wertmüller has tried to find visual expression, and there can be no doubt that she has succeeded. The Lizards may be a slight film, but it is a remarkably evocative one.

Elizabeth Sussex, "Film Reviews: 'The Lizards'," in Sight and Sound (copyright © 1964 by The British Film Institute), Vol. 33, No. 2, Spring, 1964, p. 94.

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'The Lizards'