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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 21, 1976)
Lilia’s best rates caricature tsy uavia coursen What would people say about a director whose gailery of female characters consisted almost en tirely of whores, bitches and nag ging housewives whose sole pur poses in life seemed to be to tor ment, control and dehumanize the working class studs who love them? And what if that same director's idea of humor were to show the revulsion of one of those studs at the prospect of sex with an (ugh) unattractive woman not just by showing the facial contortions with which the man registers his disgust but by using the distorting perspective of a fisheye lens to make the woman appear even fat ter (i.e. more repulsive) than she actually is, in order to help the au dience sympathize with the man as human and to laugh at the woman as an object? And what if that same director had a fondness for rape scenes in which the women — foolish things — resist for a while but eventually succumb to the pleasures that can only flow out of the loins of man? And, finally, what if that director unashamedly and self consciously (and often for no good reason) mimicked the styles and visual motifs of — to name a few — Antonioni, Fellini, and Ber tolucci, and even plagiarized the color textures from Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter? Well, if the director's name were Lina Wertmuller, people would call her a major new cinematic tal ent, the first distinctively female director in contemporary cinema. Of course, the viewer whose sole criteria for merit in film is the ab sence of sexism might do well to avoid most movies, and if imitating the work of other directors were prohibited, no films would have been made for forty or fifty years. But with Wertmuller, too often sex ism passes for feminism, plagiarism for originality, and more to the point, cruelty passes for compassion and confusion for ambiguity. Not only does Wertmuller take pains to show people being op pressed by their social or political environments, but she examines their sufferings with such enormous gusto and enthusiasm that it's hard to avoid the suspicion that it’s the suffering, not the op pression that is Wertmullers real interest. Thus the setting of Seven Beauties, a concentration camp in which one man drowns himself in a pool of shit and another collabo rates with his Nazi keepers (and shoots his best friend) may be the definitive Wertmuller setting. The director's defenders would no doubt argue that her films present, but do not endorse, degradation and debasement. But that fish eye shot (in The Seduction of Mimi) — extreme but by no means unique — plays physical deformity strictly for laughs and in so doing eloquently attests to the depth of Wertmuller s insensitivity. Despite these limitations, Wertmuller has matured since Mimi, and, at her best, has a fine feel for the comic aspects of con temporary life, politics, and sexual mores, and a wild anarchic energy. Sometimes the limitations are still hard to ignore, and her political ambivalence still degen You don't have to go this far to fix your import. - Your Beck/Arniey . Finding the right - .n foreign car parts in this \_,'s—^ country can be tough, unless ■ you find your near-by Beck/Arnley Foreign Car Parts Store. The Store has thousands of parts, from tune-up kits to ex haust systems, including repair manuals for all of the foreign cars in America. And the Foreign Car Experts at the Store can ted you just about anything A1!# you need to know to get the job done right. So b ~ • ~f ~ ZZ m next time, go to your Beck/Arnley Foreign Car Foreign Cor Ports Expert ^t^'ng^dul^r^r, con save you °r ha,f way r°°nd ** the trip. Your Beck/Amley Foreign Car Part* Store EUGENE FOREIGN AUTO PARTS 2090 W. 11th EUGENE 344-4247 10% STUDENT DISCOUNT with atudont body card erates into simple confusion, but she has discarded — at least tem porarily — that fish-eye lens, and, in her most recent film Seven Beauties, even showed a meas ure of compassion for her (male) characters. All Screwed Up (made before Swept Away and Seven Beauties but only now opening in Eugene at Cinema 7) showcases Wertmuller's strengths and con ceals her limitations perhaps as effectively as any of her films to date. Unfortunately, about half way through the film there is a "comic" rape scene as insensitive as anything Wertmuller has done. It seems that the victim — the provocateur — having refused to sleep with her loved one without marriage, or to marry him (note how the situation is so loaded our sympathies immediately to the man), finally gets what she de serves. During the assault, the woman resists until she finds her hands full with a falling television set; if she drops it, she may defend herself but the TV will surely be destroyed. This “comical" di lemma immediately trivializes the forcible sexual violation of a woman in several ways: the woman's values are so corrupt that, since she values a television set more highly than her sexual integrity, she more or less de serves to be raped. The act itself is not very violent and since the man is the woman's boy friend, the rape is not really rape anyway and immediately after the assault, Wertmuller lovingly pans over the woman’s discarded clothing to the couple in an affectionate em brace, and the woman — who has, naturally, loved it — asks for more. The woman is not here, as in Swept Away, actually made to beg for sex from the man, nor is she here transformed into a "real woman" by the incident, but in both films the patronizing treat ment of the woman, her sexual identity, and her personal integrity is as vicious and insidious as comparable scenes from the work of any male director — even Russ Meyer, the King of the Nudies. In addition, in each rape scene Wertmuller totally identifies with the male perspective or rather with male fantasies so macho they are not even shared by most men. It's particularly unfortunate that such a completely offensive, gratuitous scene occurs in All Screwed Up. Aside from that, and other, less serious lapses All Screwed Up is possibly Wertmuller's least offensive, most forceful film. The opening is a masterful example of evocative, efficient film-making; as two characters wander across an in credibly congested urban land scape, the audience experiences urban claustrophobia in an almost tactile way, and the only relief we get sets up an even more comi cally tangible intrusion of urban life into individual existence. The film is full of niceties like this open ing and a perverse "dance” of the cadavers and workers in a slaugh terhouse. Still, while Wertmuller's nasti ness, here as elsewhere, limits her characterizations to the super ficial, it also gives her a vivid sense of caricature; my favorite example is a slimy gangster with a blonde streak in his hair. And of course the characters are meant to be this way, dehumanized by the conditions in which they are forced to live. In fact, characters that exist as ideas rather than people are ideally suited to play the role of abstract victims. The energy, bite, and humor of All Screwed Up. suggest that, de spite her limitations, Wertmuller does have genuine talent and that if she acquires a sense of human dignity, a measure of compassion for women as well as men, for the ugly as well as the beautiful, she may grow into the major artist her admirers claim she already is. But her most recent film, Seven Beauties celebrates survival, even purchased at the expense of human dignity, and a director who believes in survival above all is not likely to renounce the superficial malice that has won her such general commercial and critical success. In any case, All Screwed Up, — Wertmuller's least com mercially successful film, may well be her most forceful, if not coher ent, look at the pains and disloca tions of modern life. All whose children? The first three weeks of this col umn have dealt with the history of “All My Children." But from now on, the assumption is that people know the characters and the has sles they've dealt with over the last seven years. Three weeks ago, we left Ann with her baby girl nestled nicely in her arms. While you'd never con vince her of it, all is not well with Ann s baby. Tests results are in, and there is no doubt that the baby contracted toxoplasmosis while in the womb. While perfectly normal on the outside, there is at least some damage, though how much is not clear. Ann, having adopted Erica's approach of simply ignoring that which is unpleasant, is slowly going off the deep end. When Beth (Elizabeth is the name of the newest Martin) developed a small sniffle, Ann held her to her breast and came away convinced that she loved the germs right out of Beth's small female form. But there really hasn t been much action in that corner. Where it's really getting hot is between Line, Kitty, and her ersatz mother Mona Kane returned to Pine Val ley Tuesday to find Line and Doc tor Charles waiting for her at the (Continued on Page 7B) Qa$# RESTAURANT Offers the Most Delicious and Authentic Arabic Food. AT LUNCH: choose from Kibee, Chawarma, Kuffta, or Falafel sandwiches and ask for our special appetizer plate, Hummus Tahini. AT DINNER: enjoy a plate of our Oasis Special (Kibee), CousCous, or choose from 10 different entrees. We are on campus 875 E. 13th Avenue 342-3122 Hours Mon.-Sat. HH30 a.m.-fhOO p.m.
