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Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 6. April 2 1979

A Political Stance

A Political Stance

Another thing you can't help but notice about Love and Anarchy is its concern with politics. It's a good thing there are responsible people around who can warn us (especially us younger ones who weren't in the last war) what a terrible thing fascism is. We're extra lucky here at Victoria to have Salient and Simon Wilson (and at the moment, Downstage) to keep reminding us. Otherwise we might make the mistake of putting the PM's meanness down to colic or trouble with Thea, and forget the real issues. Good grief, we'd be voting National before you could say "$9 increase", which would be just awful.

So Lina's a good thing in that respect. She doesn't like fascists. And she makes sure we don't either they're baddies alright. But we don't get given the cartoon villainy that characterized Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (which is, now I mention it, coming back for a return season, so whatever you do don't miss it — it's a huge, beautiful, and absolutely riveting film; kind of an opera without singing in the form of a socialist reply to Gone With The Wind. Sometimes nutty, but intense and very deeply felt. Bertolucci did, after all, make Last Tango In Paris.

Mussolini

Mussolini

Surprisingly in fact, in Love and Anarchy we don't get much cartoonery at all. The players look like caricatures - one of the principal women seems a grotesque parody of Jean Harlow, the other a shop-soiled Mary Pickford — but they are emotionally complex and their conflict makes for very satisfying drama. And while the fascists are irredeemably wicked, the idealists are all hopelessly confused.

It is significant that not one of the characters from the left we meet is motivated by strong political ideology. They conspire to assassinate for assorted and purely personal reasons: revenge, outrage, a need to hit back at the system, even sentimentality. The reason they fail is because their emotions get in the way. Love and anarchy are revealed as two sides of the same coin, two different expressions of similar basic urges. It seems anarchism, or any kind of social/ political idealism, is doomed because it will be destroyed by the very forces that inspire it. The emphasis falls on the human condition (excuse the over-used phrase) rather than on any politically propagandist viewpoint.