Love and Anarchy
Lina Wertmuller and her favorite actor, Giancarlo Giannini,  took large steps toward establishing their international reputations with  this 1973 tragi-comedy about an oaf who gets it into his head to assassinate Mussolini right after the Fascist takeover of Italy. The hero's plans, however,  get a little off-track when he falls for a prostitute in the brothel where  he's hiding out. As always, Wertmuller's politics can get ahead of the rest  of her film. But her sharply perceptive and comic takes on the collapse of  various human constructions--social divisions, schemes, dignity--in intense situations is the stuff of genuine revelation. Giannini's renown in the 1970s as a new Chaplin, an innocent buffeted by the world's brutality and  easily distracted, got a big boost from his work here.--Tom Keogh