Through Babel to the Flood

Last time round, apropos of Bergman’s latest, I wrote about an artist’s right to fail; this time it is Lina Wertmüller’s turn to claim that privilege. The first important female fiction film director in Western cinema (there have been some major women directors in Iron Curtain countries; Leni Riefenstahl matters only as a documentarist), Miss Wertmüller has made four films on which a reputation can rest as firmly as any table on four well-measured legs. The Seduction of Mimi (the American titles are poorer, albeit shorter, than the Italian ones), Love and Anarchy, Swept Away, and Seven Beauties constitute a corpus that only the most rabid and purblind feminist or the most lily-white purist could find without merit, and that I consider satisfying on both the cerebral and the gut level.

In fact, this is Wertmüller’s particular strength: a combination of shrewdly perceptive intelligence (not necessarily intellectuality, but what of that?) and an uncanny sense of how the human animal behaves both in its rare, exalted moments and in its numerous absurd and farcical ones. What may bother some viewers of Wertmüller’s films is her odd attitude toward people. Though she is fond of them, she also laughs at them relentlessly; though, save the few she admires, she kicks them in their behinds, the kicks are delivered with jovial laughter. Truly, if kicks in the pants can be affectionate, these are.

JS

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John Simon

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Last time round, apropos of Bergman’s latest, I wrote about an artist’s right to fail; this time it is Lina Wertmüller’s turn to claim that privilege. The first important female fiction film director in Western cinema (there have been some major women directors in Iron Curtain countries; Leni Riefenstahl matters only as a documentarist), Miss Wertmüller has made four films on which a reputation can rest as firmly as any table on four well-measured legs. The Seduction of Mimi (the American titles are poorer, albeit shorter, than the Italian ones), Love and Anarchy, Swept Away, and Seven Beauties constitute a corpus that only the most rabid and purblind feminist or the most lily-white purist could find without merit, and that I consider satisfying on both the cerebral and the gut level.

In fact, this is Wertmüller’s particular strength: a combination of shrewdly perceptive intelligence (not necessarily intellectuality, but what of that?) and an uncanny sense of how the human animal behaves both in its rare, exalted moments and in its numerous absurd and farcical ones. What may bother some viewers of Wertmüller’s films is her odd attitude toward people. Though she is fond of them, she also laughs at them relentlessly; though, save the few she admires, she kicks them in their behinds, the kicks are delivered with jovial laughter. Truly, if kicks in the pants can be affectionate, these are.