As part of their ongoing excavation of forgotten Italian films NoShame has dug up this anthology film with shorts from Jean Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellochio. Here's Andrew Howitt with his thoughts ...
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The inconsistent omnibus film Love and Anger gathered together some of the big names in Italian art cinema: Pasolini, Bertolucci, Lizzani, and Bellocchio. It also got the cooperation of Godard, which saves the project from being labelled middling (at best). If you’re a fan of Godard, hear me: his episode, “L’Amore”, is marvelous. Released around the time of Weekend and the transitional period delineating early Godard from the Dziga Vertov pictures, “L’Amore” distinguishes itself from his own quietly violent and unsettlingly jagged feature-lengths. It boasts visual echoes of A Married Woman and Contempt while looking ahead to the paradisiacal nature scenes in One Plus One, or even his most recent, Notre Musique, but still remains engrossed in his (blah blah blah, sorry) self-reflexive concerns of the breakdown of cinema. His employment of tropes of repetition and communication (clear understanding between two couples of Italian speaking men and glorious, glorious French speaking women) match beautifully with this. Laud, laud. The whole project is overshadowed by this episode, and Lizzani, the organizer of the film, states in an interview on disc two that he is fully aware this is the case. If it’s only for the Godard, I implore you to get your hands on this film.
Lizzani’s contribution (the only truly faithful adherent to the film’s original concept of adapting and updating gospel parables to modern times) is narratively appealing, socially damning, and most intriguingly, morally ambiguous, where the good Samaritan is not only an unwilling participant, but an armed criminal. I think it’s the next best one of the bunch.
But then, it’s a fight for last place. Surprisingly, Pasolini’s is overly symbolic and unnecessarily didactic. Completely out of character. And it’s (truly, unfortunately) silly and boring enough not to give it any more attention. As for Bertolucci, it would have done him well to cut twenty minutes off this longest segment of the film. That and to think a little before he made it. The Living Theatre (his cast in the film) actors do a good job, but Bertolucci seems to have cut them loose to play some theatre games and then forgotten to direct them. The performances are evocative, but it is ultimately directionless, and I can’t tell you how many times I glanced over my shoulder to look at the clock as I watched it. Bellochio’s episode ends the film – he had been called in to replace Zurlini who had, instead of making a twenty minute segment, gone beyond his time limitations and shot a feature length film (later released as “Black Jesus”). Bellochio either missed the meetings or completely forgot to even pretend to make his short look like an adapted gospel parable. It takes place in a lecture theatre where a group of student reactionaries takes over a classroom. The whole thing is unbalanced and contradictory. It is fascinating watching Bellochio’s interview as he talks about how it went so wrong (good on him for not being pompous and trying to whitewash his shortcomings). I would recommend skipping his segment of the film but, without fail, watching him speak on it.
As with their release of Partner, No Shame has put together a well-organized booklet packed with cultural and biographical information, as well as something of a history of the project. The second disc has 80 mins. of interview footage with Bellochio, Lizzani, Pasolini’s assistant director Maurizio Ponzi (after Bellochio, the most interesting personality among them), and Bertolucci’s editor Roberto Perpignani. Keep in mind these are interviews. It is not an 80 minute documentary. Visually these are far from captivating (a few cuts per interview at most), so unless you speak Italian, all you will be doing is reading a translated transcript of their experiences on the bottom of your television screen. But Bellochio and Ponzi (and, at times, Lizzani) kept me sufficiently happy just reading.
Review by Andrew Howitt