Love and Anger

Comments have complained that this portmanteau film is dated. It would be better to say it registers a crucial political, cultural, and cinematic moment. Marco Bellocchio's short film works best to my thinking. His "Discutiamo, discutiamo" (Let's Talk; We're Talking; or maybe Talk and Talk, if you're inclined to be bored) is a dramatic imitation by students of the university movements of the late 1960s, and includes real differences of opinion (it starts with a lecture on Croce's aesthetics; later there's an attempt to set a Croce paperback on fire), and opinions worth remembering once existed. "La lotta continua" (class struggle), authoritarian schooling in ruling class values, the small percentage of youths of poor families in university--sure, that's so passé.

And for Bertolucci there's Julian Beck as Artaud; for Pasolini, dialectic around the pleasure of Ninetto Davoli. Even Godard's go-gauche, lordly treating every opinion as a quotation, letting all the wind out of what might be concern--or Amore. (See better Bellocchio's "La Cina è vicina" for a fashionable leftism.) The Rabbia or righteous wrath of the title is mostly also left to viewers back then or now, and maybe it didn't get rooted.