Books, Arts & Manners: Invigorating Ironies

WHEN Lina Wertmüller’s new film, Me, Let’s Hope I Make It, arrived here, it was promptly renamed Ciao, Professore!, which is going from bad to worse. Moreover, Miramax, the American distributor, made a couple of cuts that mess up the continuity in at least two places. But the film is very good: it returns Miss Wertmüller to the heights she achieved with her early movies, and that is saying a mouthful.

The screenplay by the director and four scenarists is freely based on a novel by Marcello d’Orta. The story is not the sort one associates with Lina Wertmüller, who has always been interested in the tangled webs of men and women lying with and to one another. Instead, we have here the tale of a schoolmaster from the north, Marco Tullio Sperelli, sent by a clerical error—Corzano for Corsano—to teach third grade in a small town outside Naples. It is exactly as if a Yankee were dispatched to the Deep South: even the speech of the locals is baffling to him. Thus the school is named for Edmondo de Amicis, the author of Cuore (The Heart, 1896), one of the world’s greatest tearjerkers, a sentimental novel about schoolchildren. Sperelli pronounces the writer’s name correctly, with the accent on the penult; the Neapolitans accentuate the antepenult. He is forced, maddeningly, to mispronounce the name of a famous author. No wonder he requests an immediate transfer.

JS

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John Simon

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WHEN Lina Wertmüller’s new film, Me, Let’s Hope I Make It, arrived here, it was promptly renamed Ciao, Professore!, which is going from bad to worse. Moreover, Miramax, the American distributor, made a couple of cuts that mess up the continuity in at least two places. But the film is very good: it returns Miss Wertmüller to the heights she achieved with her early movies, and that is saying a mouthful.

The screenplay by the director and four scenarists is freely based on a novel by Marcello d’Orta. The story is not the sort one associates with Lina Wertmüller, who has always been interested in the tangled webs of men and women lying with and to one another. Instead, we have here the tale of a schoolmaster from the north, Marco Tullio Sperelli, sent by a clerical error—Corzano for Corsano—to teach third grade in a small town outside Naples. It is exactly as if a Yankee were dispatched to the Deep South: even the speech of the locals is baffling to him. Thus the school is named for Edmondo de Amicis, the author of Cuore (The Heart, 1896), one of the world’s greatest tearjerkers, a sentimental novel about schoolchildren. Sperelli pronounces the writer’s name correctly, with the accent on the penult; the Neapolitans accentuate the antepenult. He is forced, maddeningly, to mispronounce the name of a famous author. No wonder he requests an immediate transfer.