Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

All Screwed Up Blu-ray Movie 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 Movie, 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 Movie, 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.

All Screwed Up Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The lone extra on the disc is a stills gallery with ten photos.

All Screwed Up Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

All Screwed Up is brash and funny, a non-stop satire that jabs at every social problem of Italy in the 1970s. It is a bit too narratively diffuse, though, which subsequently makes it not quite as memorable as The Seduction of Mimi or Love & Anarchy. Italian comedy fans will definitely want to pick up all three Lina Wertmüller releases from Kino-Lorber, though. They're short on special features, and the picture quality isn't quite up to Kino's usually high standards, but having these confrontational commedia all'italiana classics on Blu-ray is too good to pass up. Recommended!