Love and Anarchy

At a glance...

• Directed by Lina Wertmüller
• Released in 1973
• Runtime 120 minutes
• Watched at The Beacon Cinema
• Final feelings: A film that's afraid to lean in to all the big pieces it's utilizing for entertainment.

The blurb on the Beacon's website sold me and a sold-out theater on this as the greatest anti-fascist sex-worker romcom I've never seen, and with that level of specificity I think even with all my misgivings about this movie, they were right. Love and Anarchy promised me boisterous and brash humor with some truly iconic-seeming depictions of the workers at the brothel. The set-up was so good: a solo anarchist, radicalized by the death of a comrade, takes up arms against the fascist state and has to go where he has never gone before: a fancy house in the big city full of cocky women. In the beginning, this film establishes a network of characters, lies, and deceit that truly make it feel deserving of the label. By the end, brutal contradiction leaves everyone unsatisfied, both on and off screen.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing this film is the need to marry the continuation of that romantic introduction (in the sense of emotiveness and culture, not just the utilitarian romance between people) with the revolutionary and radical current hiding beneath the wide-eyed gaze of Tunin, our main man. The progression is, in my opinion, sloppy. While the film is able to coax passion out of Tunin about his desire to be an anarchist and to be the guy to kill Il Duce, the literal romance cannot keep up the same consistency and intensity. For me, a lot of that has to do with how separated this film actually is from the brothel. We see it as a grand set piece, it bookends the film, but at all times in between we're using other locales and settings to build up the character relationships. In that way, it doesn't feel that different from more conventional romcoms, and the romance between Tunin and Tripolina just feels hurried in an ordinary way.

None of that would matter that much if the movie concluded with courageousness. The specific subject matter means there can be no doubt that this seeks to be a deeply political film. But the climactic ending (or, perhaps, anti-climactic) is probably the least coherent place things could have gone. At least, it's incoherent if the filmmaker is trying to suggest to the audience that she is ultimately sympathetic with an anti-fascist cause. Instead of allowing Tunin to follow through with his agency in his decision, we are instead shown how the two women, Tripolina and Salomè, argue in the middle of the night over playing their part in facilitating the man's near-certain death. Salomè, after previously failing to talk Tunin himself out of his plan, is talked into taking on a motherly role for the misguided bumpkin by new beau Tripolina. She doesn't wake him the next day, Tunin awakens realizing all his internal preparation for his death is for naught, and, exploding in frustration, rage, and despair, ultimately still tries to do something. In a sense, he still gets what he wants: a death befitting an anarchist at the hands of the fascists.

Even if the romantic connection between Tripolina and Tunin was perfectly executed, this would still feel so anti-climatic, and not in the way that First Reformed was trying to be. In that film, the agent of self-destruction is truly ideologically alone. He is radicalized by someone who he himself then talks into suicide, and from that point on there is no tether between Reverend Toller's ideological justification for murder and any community in his life. In fact, it's the opposite arc over there: we see Toller find, for just a moment, a way to continue onwards, to connect with the possibility of intimacy again to resist his self-destruction. Now Wertmüller's turn: Tunin is a single man who had comrades, who watched comrades die, who took up the novel stance of truly being an anarchist in light of that death, but sought refuge and training from a whole organization of anarchists before connecting with Salomè. And Salomè herself is completely complimentary to that idea, she is posted up in this brothel for strategic purposes, and thus while acting alone, has a sense of purpose that does not purely come from an internal and personal struggle. The two characters even share that and take solace in that community together, in the ways that they can.

So, when Salomè turns to betray Tunin of his self-commitment, it feels like a cheap shot against all of anarchism and even the audience. As my girlfriend quipped, it's not really love and anarchy, but love vs. anarchy. Salomè learns to love Tunin by way of Tripolina, and in doing so condemns him to betray his one commitment that, for better and for worse, we have all come to accept as real. The film tells us, in no uncertain terms, that the idea of total abstinence from violence is persuasive and accurate. Why, by merely playing at this weak woman's heart, they can go about saying that revolutionary struggle is no different from being a soldier in nationalistic war. Did Italian anarchists see themselves as an oppositional resistance, or as an embarrassed nationalist movement that just needed to be able to draft enough men to stand in all these boots? I mean, I think I know the answer, they are called anarchists after all, but I don't know enough context to be certain.

Maybe that's why the film puts in a quote from Italian anarchist/socialist Errico Malatesta right at the end, to give legitimacy to the impassioned Tripolina and the capitulation of Salomè. I have no idea how Malatesta felt when he uttered or wrote the words that appear on screen, condemning the political salience of assassination, but I wonder if he would agree with how they were used here. As it is, we didn't even get an interesting reversal of agency from the man to the women in this film. With his violent outburst and subsequent death, I thought maybe Tunin was meant to be an exposé on a toxic lone-wolf masculinity underlying wannabe assassins. When he finally snaps and beats the women who have cared for and betrayed him so much, I figured the idea was that this was underneath his bravado all along. I still think there is text in the movie that suggests that might be a part of his character, but unfortunately for me he is far too well-connected and specific in his motivations to feel convincingly like a true edgelord. His violence at the end feels pathetic even though it is cruel, not like the breaking of a seething man but like the exuberant defiance of a child.

At the end of all of that, one thing this movie did bring was a source for a lot of great conversations. In my review process I mostly try to crystallize some thought or opinion that feels like my reaction and understanding of a movie by my own observation. I try to reserve the peeping of other reviews until I at least feel confident in a direction, so that what I'm committing to the page is uniquely of me. At this point, however, I have no idea how much of the review above is truly "mine" vs me in tandem with others, especially my girlfriend, discussing what we saw. It was her who offered up a really justified perspective to see the whole film as an almost farcical misogynistic caricature, not just of the main characters but even the other brothel girls who exist one-dimensionally as combative and rambunctious entertainers for the audience and nothing really more than that. On that specific issue of the sex workers I've come around to a somewhat similar conclusion through different means. I really wanted to be seeing a lot more of this film through the life of the brothel. Instead, Wertmüller had a more atomic approach to character and storytelling, and so while the characters say that they are all parts of varying communities, we don't actually see enough to feel that it's true. The ideology is not an ideology but a prop to this film, and that's a shame because it could have moved towards more revolutionary ends. When the credits rolled, I realize now I was just like Tunin: unsatisfied, but ultimately experiencing the ending I originally wanted.

God, now that I think more on it, isn't it just weirdly demeaning to depict a woman revolutionary who is exceptionally competent, is able to extract information easily from the head of the police, who is deeply committed to the struggle, and then show her realizing she needs to abandon her comrade's intentions through the power of motherly love? For a movie that is "about" an assassination attempt, the great twist at the end has absolutely nothing to do with the political value of assassination. I just still don't understand what her realization is, that he is misguided? Well, then the comrade who's death radicalized him must have also been misguided, as was the entire org backing them! Like, this is what I mean by it being an incomplete story, because there is an external organization of anarchists outside of Italy that are coordinating and organizing these characters into meeting. The infrastructure exists for this to be about anarchism! Instead its just turning up the stakes on a romance story to an anarchic high. God, I know exactly one person who is incarcerated who has been on a hunger strike before and the idea that I would try to stop her from doing so as an expression of my love for her is maddening.

/1973/ /2.5 stars/ /daisy talks/