Bordello Politics

By J.C.

LOVE AND ANARCHY

Directed and Written by UNA WERTMULLER

For an intelligent, vehement film, Love and Anarchy begins with dim promise. A young boy sits on a chamber pot in the bedroom of an Italian farmhouse. In the kitchen, his parents talk politics with an old friend. They are poor people, and what the little boy hears is the distillation of years full of want and struggle. The political talk is angry, what might be called, at a more comfortable distance, radical. Finally, unable to control his curiosity any longer, the little boy shouts into the other room, "Mommy, what's an anarchist?"

He receives a cursory reply then, but a more substantial one years later, when the family friend returns to the farm and is shot by the local police. This is enough to turn the boy, now a young man called Tunin (Giancarlo Gianinni), toward anarchy and toward Rome, where he journeys to fire a bullet, engraved with the initials B.M., into the skull of Benito Mussolini.

Love and Anarchy is not, however, a proletarian version of Day of the Jackal. It is equally about Tunin's being able to bring himself to commit this act of violence and about his love affair with a young whore (Lina Polito), who arouses and assuages him as the day of assassination draws closer. Tunin is no bold gunman. He is assaulted by fear, lulled by affection for the whore. It is never certain that he will be able to make his slightly mad attempt on Mussolini.

Unfortunately, the film lacks real visual unity. It is lavishly lit by Giuseppe Rotunno (cinematographer also for Fellini and Visconti), but the camera seems to move almost haphazardly, framing the characters with less care than they are acted. Besides excellent performances by Gianinni and Polito, there is a feisty characterization of a queenly whore by Mariangela Melato.

The movie has a raucous undercurrent that is pleasantly disorientating. It is a serious social speculation, but never a somber one. Even if Director-Writer Wertmuller had wanted to take that tone, the fact that a great deal of the action occurs inside what is euphemistically termed a "house of tolerance" would have made any such design unworkable. Director Wertmuller is as much concerned with evoking pleasure as deprivation; her movie has abundant vitality, which sends it skimming successfully over its thinner portions.

J.C.

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