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A bravura political jape, you're done with the revolution but the revolution is not done with you. Italy after Napoleon and before Garibaldi, the Jacobin fresh out of prison (Marcello Mastroianni) just wants to return to his aristocratic roots or maybe sail away to the New World. The family manor welcomes him back, a little ditty from his sister (Laura Betti) makes its way through the household until the camera cranes away to spot his militant mistress (Lea Massari) strolling across the garden. The ragtag comrades at the Sublime Brotherhood carry the insurrectionist torch still, being "too intelligent to believe" is the protagonist's plight, the sardonic structure has one interrupted idyll after another. "Maladies certainly become you." Paolo and Vittorio Taviani and the exhausted radical, a companion piece to St. Michael Had a Rooster or rather a withering reversal. The opening words of La Marseillaise give the title and the moniker of the most fervent rebel (Stanko Molnar), Mastroianni's vacillating traitor far prefers a sexual holiday with a confederate's lass (Mimsy Farmer) than providing rifles for a Sicily expedition. Losey masks, toads into princes and princes into toads, Jancsó ironies. Hallucinatory tableaux are punctuated by hard and swift tracks, the protagonist's iridescent childhood remembrance (purple and gold at the dinner table) is prepared by an early abduction (white robes and hoods viewed through greenish glass). Allonsanfan the dreamer, so zealous as to transform the lost cause into a rousing triumph and with this version make a believer out of the coward. The windswept prairie is a final proscenium for "un grande attore," he fumbles the costume and gets his release. "One speaks the most truth while in a delirium." Ennio Morricone's marching crescendo reemerges in Inglourious Basterds to point up the thematic alliance. With Claudio Cassinelli, Benjamin Lev, Renato De Carmine, and Bruno Cirino.
--- Fernando F. Croce |