Love and Anarchy

Why do characters in film so often fall in love at first sight? Let’s work backwards. Love is the perfect plot element - people will do anything for love. Love can give a film lift and fizz; or it can be set against some countervailing force to generate anguish. Love can be funny, cruel, terrifying. If you need your characters to do something awful, but we still need to like them, have them do it for love. A movie without love will feel unsalted, gray to our palette. But - love is not, generally speaking, simple. It’s not a fast food emotion like horror or disgust. To fall in love is to set off on a sea change, it’s rich and strange; the interior journey is fraught. When you start to talk about love, you will generally be talking for a long time; and any story in which love appears is going to be warped, if its teller is not careful, into a love story.

Thus love at first sight can be seen as a safety procedure, rendering love more inert, and thus easier to handle and less dangerous to a plot. If a character starts off here and you want to get them over to there, and to get to there they need to fall in love, and your movie has no time for love (or for this particular love, maybe you need the time to focus on other loves), then love at first sight might be an attractive option for you to explore. Of course there are other mechanisms - having characters fall in love offscreen, or smoothing it over with a montage - but none are quite so to the point. And while you can cut the Gordian knot by having all of the characters already be in love with whomever they need to be in love with - which works well in something like Die Hard, where we need to get quickly to the shooting (although even in Die Hard Bruce Willis and Reginald VelJohnson fall in love, a little), or in something like Tokyo Story, where stasis is a part of what’s being explored -in a story that requires characters to arc, binding them so tightly from the start will cramp.

Note: It’s hard for me to conceptualize a love story that features at its core love at first sight. If the love happens instantly and invisibly, how can the story be about love? But then Romeo and Juliet fall in love fast. But then maybe Romeo and Juliet is not a love story (it’s a mob story, right?). Maybe the answer is that in Shakespeare there can be no love at first sight, because none of his characters is truly in love until they’ve talked themselves into it, first - and I am not trying to be profound here, just noting a logistical complexity that Shakespeare faces, with no omniscient narrator to declare love a fact (as in the novel), and no swelling soundtrack and moist set of close-ups to drive the point home (as in film).

All of this is to say, that Love and Anarchy features a case of love at first sight, and is not a love story. It’s the story of a conspiracy to murder Mussolini. Element one of this conspiracy is Tunin, a peasant who has traveled from the countryside to Rome to do the killing. Element two is Salomè, an anarchist agent and high-end prostitute. Tunin is played by the gloriously freckled Giancarlo Giannini, Salomè by Mariangela Melato; both worked frequently with director Lina Würtmuller, during the 1970s.

Love and Anarchy came out in 1973, but is set before World War Two. We know Mussolini is not slated to die. The tension in the first half of the film comes in discovering what kind of man Tunin is. He is mostly silent, observing through green-gold pop eyes. I at least, having been conditioned by decades of moviegoing to associate silence with strength, took him at first for an awkward variation on a Clint Eastwood role. Yet from the moment he requests two lumps of sugar in his coffee, there is slippage. Shortly after they meet Salomé offers him sex as a kind of favor; he refuses - he has lots to do, he has big plans, he’s going to assassinate a dictator - but a moment later reconsiders. We begin to suspect that he is not a disciplined killing machine. In one scene, he is out at night walking with a prominent fascist, who is berating him. You should be careful, Tunin responds, if you keep talking like that, one day a poor peasant like me might lose control and stab you in the stomach. Aha we (I) say, now we’ll get to see the real Tunin! Tunin’s going to stab him in the stomach! This isn’t all just rhetorical! But it is, and all Tunin does is throw a bottle of wine, run sobbing for his mother, and adopt a kitten.

So we measure up Tunin. His chances of success look bad. In the meantime, he and Salomé’s co-worker, Tripolina, have, yes, fallen in love at first sight. Thus in Love and Anarchy’s second half the tension shifts from who Tunin is, to whether he can be saved by love. And yet the film is so much more raucous, in some grim way, than that airy formulation implies. Its characters live in their nerves, we are always an eyelash away from complete hysteria or utter languor. Much of the action occurs in the brothel where Salomé works, a giant slab of gilt and polished marble, hung with decaying oils and populated by vituperative ingenue sex workers. When they tear into each other the film reads like camp; but we also see them at rest, playing music (which emphasizes their geisha nature - that they are here to have class and entertain the elite), and at work as professionals. There is a sense that the brothel is a bad place where the unfortunate are exploited, but that also it is not the worst place, and that the level of exploitation there is sustainable, and not the sort of infinite maw that was about to open up in the middle of Europe. Perhaps Tunin should stay there - which would be a classically comic result, the young couple pledging themselves. At the film’s very beginning we see an older anarchist, who briefly plays the clown before being killed by security forces. Comedy is not a remedy. Tunin wants a remedy, and that takes him to a very dark place.

But, before he gets there, he is given at least a short time to be happy and in love. The gods of narrative device are generous, in that way.