Word: mimi
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ITALIAN DIRECTOR Lina Wertmuller's latest film has produced a paradoxical spectacle. Wertmuller, director of Love and Anarchy and The Seduction of Mimi, is a self-proclaimed socialist and "75 percent feminist". By all accounts she is also the most accomplished and exciting contemporary woman filmmaker. Yet Swept Away has been thoroughly damned as sexist by feminist critics, while apolitical middle class hordes line up around the block on New York's East Side to see the film hailed by Vincent Canby as the greatest romantic comedy of the seventies, a chic version of The Way We Were...
...Wertmuller's intention to rehearse this sexist drama uncritically. Not only do her published statements contradict this reading, but her second film, The Seduction of Mimi, is such a riotous and trenchant lampoon of Italian machismo as to make it inconceivable that Wertmuller deliberately endorses such a relationship here...
...unpleasant in recent mem ory. It is discomfiting, especially in a movie made by a woman, to see the ma jor female character turned into such an abject creature. The fact that Actors Melato and Giannini, who starred together as well in Love and Anarchy and The Seduction of Mimi, are so wonderfully skillful only tips the movie's emotional imbalance further. They bring an awk ward poignancy, a true but misplaced tenderness to Wertmuller's ruthless and unruly romance...
...Clara and her brutish husband (Renato Salvatori) married back in the southern countryside have vanished in the North, along with their hopes for a better life--shattered by poverty, overcrowding, and discrimination. All that remains is the grotesque stereotype of Italian machismo--burlesqued so successfully in The Seduction of Mimi-- in which a wife is a precious possession to be ignored until another man's interest provokes savage jealousy...
...SEDUCTION OF MiMi. Lina Wertmuller demonstrates that it is possible to make a movie about political ideas without being didactic. Wertmuller is fleet, funny and shrewd about the vagaries of human nature that we sometimes call politics...