Water Torture

By Frank Rich

THE END OF THE WORLD IN

OUR USUAL BED IN A NIGHT FULL

OF RAIN

Directed and Written by Lina Wertmuller

Though every talented film maker has the right to make a clinker now and then, Lina Wertmuller has really outdone herself in her first English-language film. This all too cutely titled comedy is not merely a failure: it's a devastating self-parody. Indeed, audiences who sit through it may well begin to wonder why they ever admired such superior Wertmuller efforts as Love and Anarchy and Seven Beauties. Or they may wonder if they stay awake.

The film is essentially a flat variation on Swept Away--with all of that hit's flaws intact but none of its wit, passion or eroticism. Giancarlo Giannini, looking understandably enervated, is back again as a macho Italian Communist; this time his sexual-political antagonist is the terminally weepy Candice Bergen, who plays his radical-chic American wife. A good part of the action unfolds in their fashionable Rome apartment on a very long, very rainy night during their marriage's tenth year. The couple are feuding, of course: about the fate of the revolution and their relationship, about her desire for independence and his ideologically hypocritical sexism. Since Wertmuller's ability to equivocate on the big themes matches Eric Sevareid's, there is no resolution to the story's many conflicts. All we ever learn is that the hero and heroine cannot live with each other and cannot live apart. We can easily do without them both.

On the way to a mawkish finale that seems inspired by Who's Afraid of Vir ginia Woolf?, the film calls attention to all of Wertmuller's worst habits. Characters are forever letting loose with faddish and fatuous pronouncements about the connections between love and power. Loud music and pounding drums on the sound track accent the script's most histrionic moments.

The raucous flashbacks that detail the on-again off-again courtship of the couple are even broader than the equivalent scenes in Swept Away. Meanwhile the camera is swirling about aimlessly, in empty emulation of the director's usually galvanizing style.

When Wertmuller ventures onto new territory, the results are equally hapless.

For some reason she has given the film an on-screen chorus whose androgynous members offer polemical asides about the hero's behavior; these cretins raise the film's misanthropic tone to a screech.

There is also a touristy foray to America, in which the windswept Bergen gets to ride a San Francisco cable car. The scene looks like a Rice-A-Roni com mercial. As Antonioni abundantly dem onstrated in Zabriskie Point, Italian di rectors should keep their distance from the U.S. The California air makes them go haywire.

One could also complain about Wert muller's routine storytelling gaffes, but perhaps the movie's most notable irritant is the endless rain. Apparently the rain, like the director's familiar holocaust images over the opening credits, is meant to remind us that we are watching the end of the world. What we see, however, is not the apocalypse but the desperation of a film maker who is all wet.

--Frank Rich

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