D’Amore E D’Anarchia
Italiaans gesproken
Engels ondertiteld
When his anarchist friend is murdered, a farm worker (Giancarlo Giannini) travels to Rome plotting to assassinate Mussolini, and takes cover in a brothel, where a sex worker (Mariangela Melato), an undercover agent, helps him to realise his plan. When he falls in love with one of the sex worker (Lina Polito), love threatens to thwart his mission, but he remains determined to carry out the assassination.
While the bawdy comedy and larger-than-life caricatures are present in Love and Anarchy, it has a more melancholy tone than of Wertmüller’s best known films, and shuns much of the ironic distance of The Seduction of Mimi and Seven Beauties in favour of a poignant portrait of an idealist man completely out of his depth. Giannini gives a much more subtle performance than in his other Wertmüller collaborations, and the scenes in the brothel offer some of the strongest females characters in the director’s filmography, with Melato on particularly fiery form.