THE SCREEN:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
SEXUAL POLITICS ture and hand-made knitwear. At the moment Mimi happens to be making her...
...people he really cares for, and his wife would hardly If Tunin in Love and Anarchy is too much of a miss him...
...We feel that his presence, so obvious now when the The only one who could be said to turn love into square is deserted, would hardly be less obvious if it politics is Mimi...
...As literary critics they are austere, hierarchic, and accordingly will I not countenance all those obscure little writers who, if they are still alive, lan- the original publication was accom- cult question by far-what are the relaguish in limbo or exile or in the jails panied by an immense publicity cam- tions of belief and actuality...
...film perceive life, Wertmuller herself included...
...That is what makes them so suthat even personal attachments are supposed to be perior to the foolish men whom they have the misfortune formed out of strictly ideological and impersonal mo- to love...
...It is so modern, spare and most important political issue for Italian men, and though imposing a place, while he is so disheveled, lumbering Mimi's progressivism may be flimsy, in the traditional and oafish a man...
...Political lesbianism is behavior in proud of this, in fact...
...But we realize sweaters, and both turn out to fit Mimi perfectly...
...But when he awakes, Tunin is without self-image, an unthinking stone plopped Tunin just shoots the nearest policeman instead...
...In order to support absosounded for Pablo Neruda: neither the with a strike by Harper & Row employ- lute belief, and reenforce absolute dePresident nor his Secretary of State of- es calling for a boycott of the book) nial of the most purblind kind, an awefered him asylum, honorary citizenship...
...The occasion, as all the world knows, including its formidable bulk and para- The heroic myth, in its nursery verwas a concatenation of events which phernalia of notes and glossaries, names sion (and only the purity, innocence abruptly ended Solzhenitsyn's life as a and allusions, historical and political, and irreality of that version could subSoviet citizen: the seizure of the samiz- that are likely to mystify and finally serve the purpose), went something like dat manuscript of The Gulag Archipel- dishearten...
...Her fanati- Fiore sexually, his actions seem to parallel those of the cism, like his, comes of a purely personal desire for rightwingers who attacked her a few scenes earlier on revenge...
...Where sleep because they both love him...
...But they have become self-con- a class with the revenge Mimi exacts for the betrayal of scious about it lately because womanhood itself has been his honor...
...But instead he becomes so obsessed with rebumpkin for us to take his politics seriously, Mimi in venging his honor that he spends all his time trying to The Seduction of Mimi, the other Wertmuller film in seduce the wife of the man who made love to his wife...
...And for Despite the abundant political activity in her films, another, the first time he gets Fiore alone he practically Lina Wertmuller seems to have little regard for politics...
...Since immovably in the stream of history, Mimi is a striker of this crime is a completely inadequate substitute for attitudes, an upwardly mobile salmon leaping against the shooting Mussolini, its only effect is to show the two current of the times...
...Those whose in- some mechanism of repression, amountand the poet, a man of exquisite sensi- terest in it is casual will content them- ing to an annihilation of the little mesbility, died quietly before he could selves, one hazards to say, with glimpses, sages reality keeps sending us to anbecome a celebrated cause...
...Wertmuller's only get work in the North, and there he meets Fiore (again, politics turn out to be a sort of anti-politics...
...otherwise it will be widely myths and fictions about man and soprefer prose to verse...
...Among radical lesbians an ability to form ler's films is that they retain a womanish incapacity for only personal attachments is now held in such contempt abstract love or hate...
...In a sense love has always been the were thronged with people...
...As a result she gives him a tumble too, but a THE SCREEN marriage made in the Revolution this isn't...
...Harper & Row, 680 pp...
...Women used to be rather Wertmuller isn't one...
...women how little satisfaction he can take from love Having become a Communist out of impulse more alone...
...She makes ideology into young provincial, Tunin (Giancarlo Giannini), who something homely and comfortable to wear like her comes to Rome to assassinate Mussolini...
...When he goes on an outing to case the scene of politicized, however, it's not something that Wertmuller the attempt, a piazza where Il Duce is to speak in a approves, nor is it a result of the way the women in the few days, Tunin seems so hopelessly out of place there...
...12.50) some sense) fact...
...current release in this country, is too much of a Lothario...
...What distinguishes the heroines in Wertmulpoliticized...
...The film deals with a she knits into her sweaters...
...Thus Tunin turns out to be, like Mimi, political than conviction, Mimi must leave his native village to in an incorrigible sort of way, and Mrs...
...or psychiatric wards of South Vietnam, paign in the Western media, including Historically, prior to the gradual eroGreece, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Spain, extensive excerpts of those portions sion and collapse of belief, belief was the Soviet Union: this list too is long which were likely to receive the widest total, passionate...
...His contact in Rome, like so many imaginative, self-assertive women these a prostitute named Salome (Mariangela Melato), is a days, in the process of redefining it...
...the moment we set eyes on him-with his baggy pant Of course whether you see any political import in legs and shuffling clodhoppers he looks like an escapee Wertmuller's films all depends on how the term "politics" from an R. Crumb cartoon-that Tunin is too much is defined...
...Mariangela Melato), a sidewalk vendor of Marxist litera- Women have always been thought to have some inher9 August 1974: 430 ent incapacity for the purely abstract kinds of love and what's necessary to be a real feminist, then clearly Lina hate that politics requires...
...fiercely jealous, SAUL MALOFF possessive, nuclear...
...And-the most diffi- "war communism" was a permanent Commonweal: 431...
...For one thing, Mimi already has a wife back home...
...It's possible to read into the look on political area of love he is a real hard-liner...
...She repels the advance, but more out of In fact, she seems to dislike it altogether...
...When Mimi attacks bit more worldly-wise, but hardly brighter...
...They are, after all, the only enough to hit what he's aiming at...
...By Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn...
...tives...
...or, to put a still more acute stage, as the enemy, 'The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An it no less clumsily, what can one cominternal and external, only momentarily Experiment in Literary Investigation...
...I verybody loves Aleksandr I. Solz.i henitsyn...
...seems to enhance the ways in which the two men differ...
...Famous while still a rumor, By this I have in mind what may be ending in triumphant resolution, entered called the problem of belief...
...They have room in their capacious hearts for one big writer at a time...
...At the moment Mimi happens to be making her acquaintance, her stand is 00009*00009000 attacked by right-wing thugs, so Mimi takes most of the lumps...
...this...
...In Love conventional, Christian concern for her virtue than comand Anarchy, for instance, neither of the two main radely indignation...
...That is a form of emotional suicide, and if it is COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Where Tunin is clean-shaven and Salome and another prostitute conspire to let him overfreckled, Mimi is dark-browed and mustachioed...
...and, correspondingly, and infamous...
...molests her...
...In Love and Anarchy also, politics triumphs over love...
...and its appearance in English so was disbelief: no concession or doubt to a fascist putsch, no great alarm was seemed when it occurred (concurrently was possible...
...It ought to be the don't focus on the same spot-that he is incapable of perfect excuse for the weak-willed Mimi to let his mareither focusing his mind well enough to do anything riage lapse so he can devote himself full-time to Fiore historically significant or focusing his eyes sharply and his own bastard child...
...This side his face something wild-eyed and dangerous, but it of his nature is revealed when his long neglected wife seems more natural to conclude that his eyes simply becomes pregnant-by another man...
...Where Tunin never even combs his hair, Mimi is all On the morning Tunin is to get his shot at Mussolini, pomade and hair nets...
...When, following the convulsions ago,* his decision thereupon to publish Except on the ideological right, where of the October Revolution-by all odds the Russian-language edition in Paris, the book will be read for obvious and the pivotal event in modern history, in the violent denunciation and vilification, uninteresting reasons...
...I-II...
...The result is that he ruins not only his own slim chance That Mimi is played by the same actor as Tunin only for happiness, but Fiore's as well...
...bought and little read, for many reasons, ciety, and history...
...We feel at least implicitly that she History aside, we have the feeling from the very is involved in a more political struggle than she realizes beginning that neither of them is going to come within -the old battle of the sexes transformed into a war of a country mile of committing the assassination they in- liberation...
...in power, the class struggle, far from country...
...Their love is exclusive-monogamous, so to speak...
...The President and Vice SOLZHENITSYN'S President love him, and the Secretary of LONG CRY OF RAGE State and the Senate Minority Leader love him too: the list is long and illustrious...
...Vols...
...You can't help wondering whether she isn't, of a booby to understand ideology...
...If the love life of these characters is being tend...
...Along the snippets, summaries by way of media nounce its presence, was necessary: banks of the Potomac, it may be, they reports...
...almost anticlimactic...
...Fiore's politics resemble less the ideas characters has any political consciousness even though in the books she sells than the crazy, abstract patterns both are zealous Anarchists...
...Trans- mitted to socialism "believe" of a soci- put to rout, reassembled itself and joined lated from the Russian by Thomas P. ety which is socialist in name and (in forces to demolish it...
...In a hostile world, Whitney...
...ideological grounds...
...When Allende's Chile fell attention...
...and on the left, fact the line of demarcation between the knock on the door, the menace to especially the remnants of the "old" "pre-history" and History-the dictatorhimself, his family, friends and support- left, for more complex and humanly ship of the proletariat was entrenched ers-and then his expulsion from the interesting ones...
Vol. 100 • August 1974 • No. 18
