Waste of time

Brilliant and touching

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Lina Wertmüller, the brilliant director who had her masterpiece Swept Away famously ravaged by Madonna,seems to have an approach to her actors like a woman to a great couture dress: if it works great, wear it again. And this she did-just like in Swept Away, we have Giancarlo Giannini and Maria Mellato in the leading roles, playing a country boy coming to Rome to avenge his friend's assassination by the Fascists through murdering Mussolini. Though Fascicsm may be the motif driving the story, the center stage for this juicy treat of a film is a Roman brothel where Giannini's character finds refuge, and gets drawn into the miniature universe of prostitutes and Madames varying from obnoxiously ugly to attractive, but each one loud-mouthed and bursting with passion regarding everything they do or say. Giannini created a masterpiece with his leading role, a man tortured both spiritually and visually, but we still can see the beauty of his piercing blue eyes underneath all that dirt and scars. Melato turned the prostitute stereotype into a whole new direction with the twist in the end where we see that even though she'd never admit it, it's not always about the money, but about the heart. Lina Wermtüller's movies usually revolve around male-female stories put into some sort of an extreme environment(a deserted island, fascist Rome), which makes her stories essentially much smaller in scale, at least when it comes to the core, a cat-and-mouse play between two equally passionate people. Of course, you have all your Italian stereotypes neatly arranged here as if it were on a shelf: curvy,beautiful girls, lots of smoking, cursing and alcohol, a bit of politics and a love story. As they would say: bravissimo.

I saw this movie in the 1980s but it remains an all time favourite. It is a terrific story with a range of characters who demonstrate extremes of character. The women are sexy and smart and they are critical to the story. The music by Nino Rota is wonderful and delicately placed within the story. There are many memorable scenes. The stars Giancarlo Giannini, Mariangela Melato, and Lina Polito are perfect for their roles and there are many other notables including Eros Pagni who is the brute given charge of the black shirts. I've watched this film at least a dozen times and I plan to watch it many more before I return to the earth. I commend Love and Anarchy to you.

I loved, loved, loved this film. This is Wertmuller's best film in my opinion.SPOILERS Tunin is a poor farmer from the south who decides he must take over the role of Mussolini's assassin after his older, anarchist friend is killed by the fascists in his attempt to assassinate Mussolini.Tunin meets his conspiratorial contact in a brothel, where she works undercover, so to speak. He also meets another prostitute with whom he falls in love. Wertmuller does a very good job with the romantic storyline as well.Although Tunin's first reason for assassinating Mussolini was that he "hates tyrants," he also was doing it to get revenge for his friend, but also he hoped that in this act he would "beome" someone. This story had a more universal theme of how people try to become "someone" when they feel like a "no one," and it also makes you wonder how many people there are that were like Tunin, trying to change things and failing to the point that no one even knew they had tried in the first place. Sadly, in the end, Tunin remains an unknown, and it is so sad, yet the ending is so well done, and I really think the original title is much more powerful than just "Love and Anarchy" because of the ending. At 10 o'clock in the morning, in via dei Fiori, in a well-known brothel... he is no one. I love Giancarlo Giannini, and he does a really good job in this film playing a different character than his usual Wertmuller characters.

The well-regarded director Wertmuller made this movie which is a slow study into how brutality and violence can be saved my love in my opinion. It is very operatic which is how she chose to attack it. The direction, I can say is flawless but the movie feels incomplete. First, I am more the director who uses visual images rather than hammy stagey dialogue to tell their stories. Carnini is the only actor who does not use a pantomime, overexagerrated style in the movie until the very end, while everybody else does. It softens the impact of the movie as it is the quieter moments that carry real weight. The style of direction is very narchiac with wonderful wide shots and good editing creating an effigy of exuberance over the picture. Most of the picture set in an italian bordello where the fascists of italy stay is a place for both love between carnini and pesilamo. Images are beautiful, and certain individual scenes work while others don't. We are left with a great understanding of what love must feel like but the brutality of man is never explained. It esssentially sets up the theory that all fascists are naturally evil. The ending tells us it is the stoty of one man while the movie sets it up as the story of every man. This the best explanation I can give without speaking too much about its plot. Wertmuller was much better in Swept away and seven beauties. But for an introduction to Wertmuller, and arty Italian cinema of the sixties and seventies which dealt very operaticly with evils of fascism.