[The Seduction of Mimi and Love and Anarchy] reveal a mature and major talent, one which shows that Fellini's influence on the films of his own country has not been wholly malign but, in the hands of a disciplined disciple …, can be made to serve large and significant purposes….

Wertmüller moves beyond bourgeois Italian modernism to demystify the experience of alienation by rendering transparent the clouded consciousness of private life. She picks up the pieces of Fellini's world, draws together the fragments of dream and memory on the one hand, and inert spectacle on the other, and shows that they are part of a whole. She reveals the peculiar historical circumstances which gave rise to the cleavage between private life and production, and thereby lays the bias for overcoming it. Unhappily, this vision of wholeness is unavailable to her characters, who perceive it, if at all, by its absence. They are destroyed, for the most part, by their own blindness or the incomprehension of others. (p. 10)

The Seduction of Mimi is a comic examination of the disintegration of a traditional society under the impact of industrial development and, at the same time, a demonstration of the superficiality of ideological change in the face of deeply ingrained culture patterns of behavior. (p. 11)

It is tempting to regard [the sequence depicting Mimi's seduction of the obese Amalia] as an explicit commentary on Fellini. It is introduced by a Saraghina-like figure (8 1/2) who welcomes Mimi and lends her services to his designs; she functions, in short, as a kind of resident deity in the same way that Marx and Lenin preside over Fiore's home. More central, however, is the transformation of Amalia from person (albeit slightly ridiculous) to spectacle, that is, to an object with which we, as irresponsible spectators, are morally uninvolved. She has stepped out of Satyricon or Roma, a bloated and deformed freak. For Fellini, reality as spectacle is never classically proportioned, but is chaotic and incoherent, peopled with monstrosities, deprived of symmetry by the absence of consciousness or a principle of meaning. Unlike Fellini, however, and it is a crucial difference, Wertmüller shows us how Amalia came to be seen this way. Her transformation from subject to object is the end product of a voluntary act situated in a moral universe. (pp. 12-13)

Wertmüller's interrogation of Fellini is extended in her treatment of the relationship between subjective fantasy and reality. As Mimi's blindness to the political implications of his personal choices betrays him into the hands of the Mafia who manipulate private values like family honor for their own ends, in his imagination he attributes his misfortunes to the persecution of a ubiquitous and omnipotent Mafia chieftain whom he sees lurking behind every tree. (p. 13)

Like The Conformist and The Investigation of a Citizen Beyond Suspicion, Love and Anarchy deals with the fascist period, but Wertmüller avoids exotic studies of the psychosexual roots of the authoritarian personality which themselves perpetuate the alienation of personality from production, in favor of an examination of the motives of a common man, a "nobody"…. Love and Anarchy is not so much an analysis of anarchism as a political doctrine, moral or immoral, practical or utopian, as a meditation on the sources of political action. It portrays the anarchist as saint, as the Dostoevskian Holy Fool, Prince Kropotkin as Prince Myshkin. (pp. 13-14)

In accord with its dualistic title, Love and Anarchy divides its world neatly in two. Public is set against private, politics against love, fascism against anarchism, men against women. (p. 14)

The interior of the brothel, dark and soft, is the compliment to the fascist world without. Here, the larger contradiction between politics and love is reproduced in the contrast between Salome and Tripolina. Salome is blonde, bawdy, and loud, a perfect match for Spatoletti whom she manipulates for her own political purposes as he uses her for his sexual ones. The antithesis of Salome is Tripolina, who gives voice to the demands of private life. She is, like her surroundings, soft, dark, and sensual. (pp. 14-15)

The brothel mirrors the regimentation of the fascist state. Female sexuality has been assimilated to the system of capitalist commodity exchange. For these women, family and private life have almost ceased to exist, thereby rendering their longing for love and personal satisfaction more pathetic and desperate. Under these circumstances, this aspiration becomes utopian and destructive, an end in itself and therefore an impossible illusion. As the film shows, there can be no love under Fascism. (p. 15)

Both Tripolina and Salome reflect, in opposite ways, the alienation of privacy from production. Both Tripolina and Salome divorce love from anarchy, life from politics, and consequently entertain a partial view of Tunin who becomes a sentimentalized reflection of their own needs. To Salome, Tunin is heroic political man: "I thought you were a saint, because you were ready to die for an ideal." To Tripolina, he is exclusively a lover, and a reminder of her own lost innocence…. The casual manner which has characterized the film's treatment of its themes is suddenly shattered by an entirely unexpected outburst of emotion [when Tripolina and Salome wrestle on the bathroom floor]. Tunin is revealed in all his contradictory fullness—humiliated and terrified to the point of imbecility, and at the same time exhibiting the capacity for a surprising and alarming amount of violence. (pp. 15-16)

What can we make of all this? On the level of the alienated culture of capitalism, which dictates the roles and perceptions of the principals, it seems indeed that love and anarchy don't mix. Like the mothers who hover at the fringes of the drama—Tunin's mother (at the beginning, baby Tunin's question: "What's an anarchist?" is answered by his mother with wry irony: "Someone who kills a prince or a king and is hanged for it") or the maternal figure nursing a baby outside the room (like his mother's room, Tunin remarks) where Tunin and Tripolina first make love—Tripolina plays a traditional conservative role. But she finds that to protect the males of the oppressed class from the oppressor, from prison or certain death, the mother must not only come between him and the oppressor, but between him and his own aspirations for self-respect, between him and history and life itself. For in reality, love and anarchy are not antagonistic, but indissolubly bound together….

And what of Tunin? In a sense, the film offers an alternative to the flippant answer provided by his mother to the question which begins the film. Tunin, naked with fear, stripped of dignity, nauseated at the sight of the death inflicted with his own hand, humiliated by the failure even of his attempt to commit suicide, yet attains the unheroic but not immodest dignity of resistance—the refusal to talk under torture, the refusal to capitulate to overwhelming power. It is the heroism, in short, of the forgotten ones. (p. 16)