MOVIE REVIEW : CHAOS REIGNS IN LINA’S ‘CAMORRA’

Whatever happened to Lina Wertmuller?

A decade ago she was one of the most exciting film makers in the world, capping a series of inspired, socially conscious comedies with “Seven Beauties,” in which she argued provocatively that only in chaos is there freedom. The irony is that her own hard-earned struggle for freedom as an artist has ended up in utter chaos.

Wertmuller’s shoot-from-the-hip style, which has always been jagged, has become so slapdash as to be downright arrogant. She seems to think that anything that occurs to her will work just as long as she’s passionate about it.

“Camorra” (at the Beverly Center Cineplex) is the latest--and worst--in a string of increasingly shrill, aggressive and ludicrous Wertmuller movies. That it is being shown in wretchedly dubbed English is its coup de grace.

Somehow, Wertmuller persuaded two of Spain’s finest film actors, the tempestuous Angela Molina and the distinguished veteran Francisco Rabal, to star along with Harvey Keitel. Molina plays a one-time teen-age prostitute who now runs a picturesque pensione with a childhood friend (Daniel Ezralow), a modern dancer who also operates a ballet school across the alley.

Rabal is a blind, elderly leader of the Camorra (the Neapolitan equivalent of the Mafia) whose son (Tommaso Bianco) ends up dead as he attempts to rape Molina. Somebody has stuck the corpse strategically with a hypodermic needle, which is to become the signature of a series of killings of Naples drug dealers. The key suspect is Keitel, since he’s a maverick dealer (and Molina’s ex-lover); about two-thirds of the way through the movie Wertmuller abruptly reveals the truth without having generated any suspense whatsoever. Scarcely has the war on drugs been so ill served; there’s not a frame in all of “Camorra” that works as reality or fantasy (or anything in between).

Everyone is dubbed in a kind of “Prizzi’s Honor” Brooklynese, which destroys whatever characterizations Molina, Rabal and others were trying to work up, but at least the accents match Keitel’s, who does his own dubbing. There’s a crude kind of parallel with the brutal Keitel, who smacks Molina around like most all the other men in the film do, and the gentle, predictably ill-fated Ezralow.

“Camorra” moves incoherently from one grandiose locale--an old church, a great domed nightclub, a gangster’s lavish bunker (designed by Wertmuller’s husband Enrico Job) and inevitably to the glass roof of Naples’ famed arcade, the Galleria Umberto I. But such settings, shot in all their splendor by Giuseppe Lanci, who’s photographed the recent Bellochio and Taviani films, simply make the way Wertmuller has used them seem all the more trivial and nonsensical. Even as her inspiration fails, her energy never flags, but “Camorra” (rated R for violence, some nudity) shows, more than ever before, how badly she needs to channel it.

‘CAMORRA’

A Cannon release of a Cannon-Tuschinski production in association with Italian International Film. Executive producer Fulvio Lucisano. Producers Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus. Writer-director Lina Wertmuller. Screenplay consultant Elvio Porta. Associate producer John Thompson. Camera Giuseppe Lanci. Production designer Enrico Job. Costumes Benito Persico. Music Tony Esposito. Choreographer Daniel Ezralow. Film editor Luigi Zita. With Angela Molina, Harvey Keitel, Francisco Rabal, Isa Danieli, Paolo Bonicelli, Daniel Ezralow, Vittorio Squillante, Tommaso Bianco, Raffaele Verita, Elvio Porta.

Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).