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The Italian Aristophanes?
"Man in disorder - that's the only hope," announces a cherubic prisoner in seven beauties; and this about defines the breadth, if not the sophistication, of Lina Wertmuller's polemic thus far. Despite a lot of priapic/political hoopla and belly laughs at the expense of State, Church, Mafia, and even the Communist Party, Wertmuller is a political filmmaker in the tradition of Chaplin rather than CostaGavras: she deplores Hitler (and Mussolini) and is out of sorts with a System that traps her wide-eyed little man - Giancarlo Giannini - somewhere between freely willed and predestined chagrin. Her throbbing camera is also not so secretly in love with this socio-political System, just as her neorealist predecessors were with the war-bruised and compromised city of Rome. For with what else would she justify her messy sexual romanticism or cloak and bawdy comedy and subliminal cruelty that are the backbones of an often redundant but increasingly provocative body of work?
The 47-year-old Wertmuller is not a socialist, but an Italian socialist (there is a world of difference she assures us); and despite an early so-called Women's Lib film, this time lets talk about men, she is anything but doctrinaire feminist. The foremost woman director (or as Molly Haskell said, "the woman director to put woman-directing on the map") she is alarmingly blasé about the plight of her sex on- and off screen. "Mammon helps those who help themselves" seems to be her off-camera advice to would-be women acolytes, and her actresses emerge as elephantine variations on the clichéd female mind or body. In Wertmuller vernacular, man usurps the classic female "receptacle" role in his relationship with the bullish lust of the political system. Women in turn are portrayed as either instruments or ornaments of that system. They are sirens (like heartless television fetishist Adelina of all screwed up) and frustrated sybarites (along the lines of Mariangela Melato's clear-headed Marxist in the seduction of mimi), waiting only to be loved into motherhood and marshmallowy submission. The "ornaments," on the other hand, tend to be mole-branded leviathans like the gargantuan- thighed adulteress of mimi or Shirley Stoler's titanic love object of an SS Guard in SEVEN BEAUTIES.
An exaggerated fondness for distortions is among the predilections Wertmuller has...