All Screwed Up

Coming off her first masterpiece, Love & Anarchy, Lina Wertmüller dropped the stars and more playful tone for this scattershot glimpse on modern living in Milan viewed through the prism of recently arrived citizens of southern Italy. The film is essentially an assembly of various pieces struggling for a wider shape. This isn’t to say that several comedic and musical suites don’t work or aren’t entertaining, but that the whole is not the sum of its parts.

Our main country rubes are fools that get conned or used as punchlines to underscore the basic uncaring nature of the big city. Some dream of upward mobility while others dream of personal happiness and fulfillment. There can occasionally be overlap between these two yet Wertmüller’s eye is eternally on the satirical. Catch the scene where a character must choose between her virginity or an expensive television that combines a certain squeamishness and slapstick comedy.

Perhaps the greatest scenario in the film happens early when Wertmüller correlates two characters working in a slaughterhouse with their lot in capitalistic society. As animal carcasses are bled out, gutted, and strung up, Wertmüller underscores these scenes with classical music so it plays out like a deranged waltz.

All Screwed Up is only as good as any of its provocations, and some of them are a bit limp. A protracted subplot involving one character’s incredibly fertile womb and her anemic, neurotic nature is a bit of a slog to get through, and it occupies too much time for my liking. But Wertmüller express a reoccurring motif of the corrosive and narcotic pull of modernity to the fresh-faced innocent, along with plenty of her typical sexual and political hot buttons. It’s a patchwork that flails about in the wind, but it has moments of absolute brilliance.