All Screwed Up Blu-ray Review
Funny, but unfocused.
Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, June 22, 2012
The original Italian title for Lina Wertmüller's
All Screwed Up is
Tutto a posto e niente in ordine, which
approximately translates as "everything in place, but nothing in working order." That sums up the
content of the film,
which is about the strains and absurdities of life in urban 1970s Milan, but it's also reflective of the film itself. All of
Wertmüller's usual themes are in place here—political injustice, gender disparities, rape, labor disputes, intra-Italy culture
clash—but the multi-character story is so scattershot that it doesn't always work.
That's not to say it's a failure. While not nearly as cohesive as Wertmüller's previous and following efforts—
Love &
Anarchy and
Swept Away—the movie is still a worthwhile experience for fans of
commedia all'italiana.
After all, an overambitious scope is far from the worst fault a film can have, and
All Screwed Up does project a certain
chaotic glee that mirrors the squalor of the city.
The film opens with best friends Gigi (Luigi Diberti) and Carletto (Nino Bignamini), two country boys from Sicily—"fresh out of
a hen's ass," as one character puts it—disembarking in cosmopolitan Milan in search of work.
Fish out of water
doesn't even begin to describe their out-of-place awkwardness. Carrying all their possessions in the world, they get lost,
bump into strangers, and within a half-hour of arriving get suckered by a con-artist into buying a stolen moped at a vastly
inflated price. They find a meat-packing gig at an enormous abattoir—where Wertmüller shows us, in
extremely
graphic detail, how cows are killed and butchered—but on their first day on the job, their union strikes and squares off against
police in riot gear. We also see elaborate alleyway graffiti with leftist slogans, and watch crowds of demonstrators shouting
"down with smog" and "hurrah for nature" and "let's chase the landlords into their basements." The times, they are certainly
a'changin', and the two Southern bumpkins are thrown right into the middle of the insanity.
By chance, Gigi and Carletto fall in with a group of similar working class outsiders, all trying to make it in the big city with
minimum cash-flow. There's Adelina (Sara Rapisarda), a chaste Sicilian transplant who's always fending off Gigi's advances,
her blond coworker Biki (Giuliana Calandra), who supplements her income from her industrial laundry job by whoring herself
out on the side, and the virile, sad-eyed Sante (Renato Rotondo), who frets perpetually about how he's going to feed his ever-
increasing number of kids. (Within the span of two years, his wife has twins and then quintuplets.) Communal living makes
sense in this context, so they all move into a large but dilapidated flat together, and the women—knowing they'll be expected
to do most of the housework—smartly work out a way to monetize their chores, charging the guys a few lira for every little
convenience. This may not be outright fight-for-equality feminism, but it's subversive effectively.
The film plays out in a collection of episodic events strung together by a shared theme: it's tough to get ahead. Carletto and
Gigi find new employment in the bustling kitchen of a pizzeria that makes upwards of 2,000 pies a day, and the restaurant
seems to serve as a metaphor for Italy's materialist post-war society—the working class slaving away behind the scenes for
little pay so the rich can mindlessly consume. It's hard to get out of the kitchen, so to speak. Carletto tries, seduced by the
idea that crime might pay, but he ends up working for a sleazy wannabe mafioso (
Love & Anarchy's sublimely over-
the-top Eros Pagni) whose idea of revenge involves painting a rival's car—headlamps, interior, and all—with excrement. Sante
gets mixed up with some shady fascists, and Gigi—otherwise one of the most likable characters in the film—basically becomes
a rapist, pressuring Adelina into sex. Wertmüller pulls off this particular scene with a tricky combination of terror, comedy,
and satire, as Adelina is pushed onto the ground and into a table supporting the new communal TV, which totters precariously
overhead. The question is simple but pointed: Does she protect her virginity, or save the TV from falling? The illusions of
success and upward mobility cause all of the characters to compromise themselves— Wertmüller seems to be saying—and
become worse people than they'd otherwise be.
Chaotically funny and almost ADHD in the way it flits from one subject to the next,
All Screwed Up tries to touch on
nearly every big city social woe and ideological cause of the 1970s. Student protests and crowded tenements. Vegetarianism,
feminism, and socialism. Prostitution and organized crime. Unemployment and labor unions. As impressive as it is that
Wertmüller could work all this into one story, the film has a distinct
throw everything against the wall and see what
sticks quality. And not everything sticks. Some scenes burn with incendiary satire—like the two beggars outside a butcher
shop who, when informed they're disturbing the customers, respond that
they are being disturbed by the meat—while
others fizzle out. Still, the pace is so breakneck that you never have time while watching to reflect on what works and what
doesn't. If
Love & Anarchy is a bullet, and
The Seduction of Mimi a squirt from a satirical water gun,
All
Screwed Up is a cinematic shotgun blast.
All Screwed Up Blu-ray, Video Quality
Of the three Lina Wertmüller films released by Kino-Lorber this week,
All Screwed Up has the best Blu-ray
presentation, with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that looks more naturally filmic and less prone to compression than the other
two, which often suffer from excess noise that obscures fine textures, softens hard lines, and affects the gradation between
colors. I reached out to Kino about this, and was told "the HD masters came from a different source than usual, Societe
Nouvelle de Distribution, and were not transferred by Bret Wood, who normally oversees most of our Kino Classics titles."
Some of the small quirks are still here in
All Screwed Up, but to a much lesser extent. The grain structure appears free
of excessive DNR, there's no sign of edge enhancement, and the print itself is in good condition, with only minor age-related
damage. (The usual white specks, and some infrequent brightness flickering.) The level of clarity marks a solid improvement
over previous, standard definition editions—although the film has never and will never look
sharp sharp—and color is
satisfying dense and presumably accurate, with a neutral, realistic quality. No real issues here.
All Screwed Up Blu-ray, Audio Quality
Like the other two films,
All Screwed Up features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio mono track that's listenable and
probably as good as the film is ever going to sound. There are some source and age-related issues, of course, but nothing
particularly distracting. The dubbing is sometimes obvious and not always perfectly recorded, for instance, but if you watch a
lot of Italian films from this era, you're already used to that. Regardless, the dialogue itself is balanced nicely in the mix and
doesn't sound quite as brash as the voices in
The Seduction of Mimi. The film features a surprisingly funky score by
Piero Piccioni—who also did
Swept Away and Jean-Luc Godard's
Contempt—and the music sounds great, if
somewhat dynamically restrained. The disc includes optional English subtitles, which appear in easy-to-read white lettering.
