Rediscovering Lina Wertmuller’s Love and Anarchy

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Lina Wertmuller is not a household name—and that’s the scandal. While Bertolucci’s Il Conformista was showered with accolades, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and becoming a staple of film canon lists, Wertmuller’s Love and Anarchy received a mere nod at Cannes. A much better film! Giannini won Best Actor, but the film itself faded into cult memory. Perhaps, some would say, a testament to the treatment...

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Lina Wertmuller is not a household name—and that’s the scandal. While Bertolucci’s Il Conformista was showered with accolades, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and becoming a staple of film canon lists, Wertmuller’s Love and Anarchy received a mere nod at Cannes. A much better film! Giannini won Best Actor, but the film itself faded into cult memory. Perhaps, some would say, a testament to the treatment of women in a male dominated industry.

Because Love and Anarchy is the more daring, more intimate, and more devastating film. It doesn’t just examine fascism—it seduces and entangles in a dreamy, realist, party-like atmosphere.

Giancarlo Giannini plays Tunin, a farmer turned would-be assassin, sent to Rome to kill Mussolini. But instead of ideology, what awaits him is love, exhaustion, and a brothel full of fragile dreams. This isn’t a tidy anti-fascist parable. It’s a slow spiral into disillusionment, set in a Roman brothel where politics blur with intimacy. A man arrives with a mission to kill Mussolini and instead finds himself undone by tenderness, exhaustion, and the quiet absurdity of hope.

Tunin is beautiful and doomed, like so many idealists before him. But Wertmüller doesn’t martyr him; she has him fall apart, surrounded by beautiful women. As in The Lizards, (I basilischi, 1963—my favorite of her films), Wertmüller’s first film, we find a decidedly female viewpoint—in which the leading male, a hero of sorts, is slightly more flawed than we’re used to.

Lina Wertmüller was born in Rome in 1928 and spent much of her early career in theater and television before turning to film. A former assistant to Fellini, she developed a style that mixed political critique with dark humor and emotional unpredictability. Though she made history in 1977 as the first woman nominated for Best Director at the Oscars, much of her work—including Love and Anarchy—remains less widely seen. She died in 2021, leaving behind a body of films that still feel urgent, unruly, and strangely underappreciated.

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