441 - Lina Wertmüller

Lina Wertmüller
By Neil P. Hurley

A REFRESHING new sensibility about the social complexities of our day has reached the screen in the person of Lina Wertmüller, the Italian film director with the German name. Women were important in the earliest contributions to film-making. The silent era boasted important scenarists such as Jeanie MacPherson, Frances Marion, Anita Loos, Jane Murfin, and Sonya Levien. In the sound period, female directors included Dorothy Arzner, Leni Riefenstahl, Ida Lupino, Maya Deren, and, in the sixties, Agnes Varda and Shirley Clarke. Now Lina Wertmüller has gained entry to that charmed circle of world-class filmmakers such as Chaplin, Griffith, Ford, Renoir, and Lang. Eisenstein is perhaps the only Pantheon director who was mainly preoccupied with political themes. But now Lina Wertmüller, a "reel" revolutionary, is interested in exploring how the mechanisms of social change operate in the lives of ordinary people. She treats the larger issues of justice, class struggle, and power while focusing her camera lens on romantic couples, usually played by Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato. No other revolutionary filmmaker is so romantic and yet so harsh in revealing the saw-tooth realities of life.

Wertmüller sees male-female relationship as crucial in understanding the psycho-drama in twentieth century Italy where capitalism, Christianity, and communism clash in the struggle for identity and survival. The microcosm of personal feelings is a peephole into the macrocosm of society. Her best films have one subtext: the split between authoritarian forces and the communitarian impulses of little people who yearn for a society closer to the heart's desire. These little people are trapped, in part by their own weakness and in part by environmental pressures. In Seven Beauties, a basically sympathetic "little man" keen on personal and family honor, nevertheless performs violent and degrading acts just in order to survive. Wertmüller senses that as in the Bible, life is a duel between bitter circumstance and personal integrity with ironic outcomes that wound even when they are not lethal. In the Seduction of Mimi and Love and Anarchy, Lina Wertmüller seems to be saying that the acids of modernity are eating away the foundations of Catholic rural Italy, that somehow the acquisitive spirit and individual incentives must find a modus vivendi. Her radical disposition (both emotional and intellectual) inclines her toward a "socialism with a human face."

Take her devastating critique of the consumer society in All Screwed Up (whose original Italian title, Tutto aposto, e niente in ordine, means: "Everything is in place but nothing is in order"). Her

Neil P. Hurley, S.J., is a member of the Department of Journalism, Loyola University, New Orleans.

442 - Lina Wertmüller

attack on the mass production system is all-out as we see steers in a slaughter-house being ritualistically killed while the carcasses are pushed about from overhead pulleys. The scene is accompanied by music and suggests a Busby Berkeley musical, choreographed for esthetic symmetry. Scene after scene reinforces her ideological unmasking of urban-technological society-men working in an ice house and sniffling, Greenwich Village-type apartments surrounded by impersonal high rises, overcrowding of tenements, the chaos of a restaurant kitchen, the economic burdens of large families with unwanted children, the erotic games played by men and women whose work is devoid of meaning, and, finally, the passion for consumer goods.

One scene stands out in particular as devastating comic satire. A man, tired of his Sicilian girl friend's coolness, tries to ravish her; she tries to protect herself but finds she must hold up the color TV receiver lest it crash to the floor. Lying on the floor and supporting the offbalance set, she is an easy mark. Choices are difficult and virtue an unaffordable luxury. Wertmüller rarely plays with irony; she wields a satirical rapier with the guard-button off.

The film's climatic scene is latent with protest, although the revolutionary bomb that Wertmüller plants is defused. The central recurring image in All Screwed Up is the restaurant kitchen which is a miniature replica of the larger society outside. The camera work and crazy-quilt composition is brilliant as bodies hurl past one another with trays and white-frocked chefs give orders to subalterns with self-conscious authority. The scenes in the kitchen are pure opera-bouffe-but then suddenly there is a bomb scare, perpetrated by a right wing terrorist group. Then all cooks, waitresses, and employees look to the left of the screen, gazing expectantly. Is a new order coming? What will happen? The boisterous sound track falls silent-it is a moment pregnant with revolutionary possibilities. Will some leader give the signal to attack, thus channeling the unrest and frustration we have been shown building in previous scenes? Wertmüller, who alludes to memorable films, is obviously saluting Eisenstein's Strike! as well as many "Third World" films, such as Burn!, John Reed: Insurgent, The Tupamaros, which show the beginning of revolt. The scene for drastic change is set. The tension mounts-but suddenly someone shouts an order for a customer. The old habits take over-everyone returns to their habitual role-playing. Everything is back in place, but, as Wertmüller has convinced us, nothing is in order.

Italy has had riots, strikes, food and fuel shortages, police repression, and financial crises. Are Lina Wertmüller's films ominous portents of what is to come? She hints at violent revolution. Like Sam Peckinpah, her films scare audiences, but are such doomsday prophets closer to understanding the motives that really move us in the west despite our rationalization, our rhetoric, our routinized roles? Not only Italy but western civilization is caught in the vortex of a huge whirlpool where the eddies of Christianity, capitalism, Marxism, and commu-

443 - Lina Wertmüller

nism are swirling around together. No other director has made us feel these macro-historical contradictions through such poignant personal narratives which link-up the influences of Christ, Marx, Freud, and Coca-Cola. Pauline Kael said of Jean-Luc Godard that no one could follow him for he burnt up all the ground. Lina Wertmüller has found new ground-a fascinating "outlaw" area where no previous director has ever been.