professortiki

Funny how this film is not funny at all, despite all the famous comedian names in it, namely Peter Sellers and John Cleese of Monty Python. It has some absurdity qualities though, like the scene in the train, where a Japanese traveller is repeatedly replaced by a strange mechanism built in his seat. Newsreel snippets include scenes from the Vietnam war or race protests in the US indicate, indicating, that this movie was probably meant and being read by the audience of the day as satire. However a satire should be the least bit of funny or enlightening. So it remains unclear, where this film actually goes. It lacks the playful poetry of a Fellini or the magic surrealism of Luis Buñuel. It's child of its time, that has terribly aged.

Much has been said about this unique film in other reviews, so I do not need to repeat a summery of the story. Let me just add three more aspects:

This film contains beautiful pictures of the mediteranean landscape on a remote lonely island. Lina Wertmüller dips her images into all kinds of different magical colors. You want to be there forever and that's exactly what adds to the story of an outer-worldly romance.

Secondly the film has great music. The exact funky easy type that has been reissued on so many lounge compilation CDs during the 1990s.

And last not least this film reminds us of the fact that feminism once was all but about protection zones and a new puritanism. Women embraced freedom, wildness and radical romanticism over a boring protective conventional social construct. And feminist filmmakers, which Lina Wertmüller surely is one of, preferred to tell stories of real life over predictable gender-political statements. This film does not judge, it simply shows, merciless, but also with a lot of love and an incredible sense of beauty. It may not be easy to swallow for many, but it should rather make them aware of their own inner prisons.