Lina Wertmüller

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Lina Wertmüller: 'Love and Anarchy'

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[Most] of Love and Anarchy is played as farce, and quite successfully. Apart from the ending, the film's two most effective sequences are both quite straightforwardly comic ones: a long Sunday outing in the country with Tunin, the two whores, and the security chief (hilariously caricatured by Eros Pagni, something of a Mussolini look-alike); and a boisterous scene of Tunin having his first meal in the brothel…. And though one's final impression of Love and Anarchy is of a work in a tragicomic mode, the film achieves this effect not so much by a true mixture of moods, but by their drastic alternation. Things in it aren't (as they are in, say, a Seduced and Abandoned, or the films of Buñuel) an inseparable fusion of the funny and the horrible; they are funny, and then they turn horrible. The ending of the film, in particular, is almost unbearably powerful; a sudden, swift, unrelenting outburst of sickening violence, the impact of which is such as to call into question the rampant use of prolonged slow motion as a means of intensifying the depiction of violence in films. And this stunning conclusion tends to leave one feeling that the film was all along more serious than it often seemed, a feeling reinforced by the work's being bracketed by, at one end, a photomontage of Mussolini and historical note on his rise to power and, at the other, a sober quotation from Enrico Malatesta to the effect that, though the use of murder as an instrument of political action is to be deplored, what will be remembered of the acts of assassins is not the acts themselves but rather the ideals that inspired them.

Yet the more one reflects on the film, the less satisfactory its swervings of moods and meanings seem to be. For one thing, Tunin really is portrayed throughout as too much of a comic figure to be dealt so savage a fate; it's rather as if To Be or Not to Be were to end with Jack Benny being dragged off, kicking and screaming, to face a firing squad. Moreover, though the closing quotation tends to impart a retrospective dignity and high-mindedness to all that's gone before, it seems singularly inappropriate to the case of Tunin, whose botched effort is made in the name of only the most generalized political sentiment ("Tyrants disgust me," he explains), and earns him only a newspaper obituary as an "unidentified" suicide…. [Throughout] most of the film, the joke seems to be Tunin's absolute unfitness for the task he's set himself, and the film's point that politics in general and tyrannicide in particular had best not be left to amateur bunglers…. Then, suddenly, we seem to be meant to see Tunin as a noble martyr to some ideological cause that will survive him. Nor is it really a case of these apparent contradictions in meaning tending to combine with and enrich each other, any more than the tragic and comic elements in the film finally jell into true tragicomedy. Rather—and it's this which I found most disturbing about the film—such things seem ultimately to have the effect of canceling each other out. (pp. 266-67)

William S. Pechter, "Lina Wertmüller: 'Love and Anarchy'" (copyright © 1976 by William S. Pechter; reprinted by permission of the author), in The National Society of Film Critics on Movie Comedy, edited by Stuart Byron and Elisabeth Weis, Grossman Publishers, 1977, pp. 265-67 (and to be reprinted in his Movies plus One, Horizon Press, 1981).

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