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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 21 - 27 September 2000 Issue No. 500 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 21 - 27 September 2000 Issue No. 500
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Elections Development Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Special Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Milk and sugar?
By Nigel Ryan
There are many reasons why Tea with Mussolini might not have been the best choice for the opening screening of the Alexandria Film Festival. It is not, after all, a new film -- is, indeed, almost two years old. In cinematic terms that means its general release is a few too many moons away to even bother counting. Its afterlife as an inflight movie, too, is well and truly over, leaving the film to exist in the nether region of video, where it is likely to enjoy a reasonably long shelf life among those fond of sentimental, light-hearted period dramas involving pensionable British actresses.
One could justifiably object to its being screened at the opening of a film festival that proclaims itself an international event on quality grounds -- it is not a particularly serious film, and no argument for its resurrection within a festival context can be made by claiming it somehow represents a cinematic event.
Admittedly, the cast is starry, in a low key, non-Hollywood way. The theatrical Dames pull out all their usual stops: Dame Maggie Smith does her standard, mannered turn as the widow of a former British ambassador to Italy; Dame Judi Dench floats around Florence in yards of chiffon, declaiming that she has drunk deep at the wells of frenzy and warmed her hands at the fires of Botticelli and Michelangelo. Joan Plowright -- Lady Olivier -- is the salt of the earth, becoming the surrogate mother to a young, illegitimate boy, while Cher croons a sultry Smoke gets in your Eyes in a perfectly realised period Schiaperelli dress. The period details, in general, are perfect, with Florence and the Tuscan countryside providing a suitably lustrous backdrop for the ladies. But hats and shoes, vintage cars and rolling hills with olive groves do not a cinematic masterpiece make, however pleasant they are to watch.
One could, with desperation, object to the film's fleeting and very coded brush with lesbianism, though to do so would be churlish since the coding is so culturally embedded that the usual, vapid, we-are-a-traditional-society kind of argument just won't wash. For without a working knowledge of the dress codes embodied in The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's dire Edwardian novel, the coding remains all but impenetrable.
Tea with Mussolini, though, was withdrawn as the initial showing of the festival for none of the above reasons. Instead, the reason given, and widely reported in the press, was that Franco Zeffirelli's film was nothing other than a piece of Israeli propaganda, with a blatant, pro-Zionist bias that had fortunately been uncovered during a special, jury screening. Members of the press were subsequently invited to confirm this judgment at a special screening. The general public, of course, whose opinions in such matters are invariably discounted given their desperate need for guidance from their intellectual superiors, were as usual excluded from the closed event.
After two viewings Tea with Mussolini's pro-Zionist propagandising, I have to confess, continues to elude me. True Elsa, the character played by Cher, is Jewish. She is also rich, and American. A former showgirl who made a lucrative, post-Zeigfield follies career out of marrying wealthy old men on the verge of heart attacks, she has managed to amass a fortune which she spends lavishly on an impressive collection of modern art. And the English ladies in Florence, led by Maggie Smith, playing Lady Hester Random in redoubtable, Lady Bracknell mode, tend to dislike her because she is rich, American, brash and a Jew.
The English women, interned as enemy aliens when Italy enters the war, find their lives made more comfortable by Elsa's anonymous intervention: unbeknown to them, she bribes the Italian authorities, and the women enjoy enviable privileges as a result. Theirs, it seems, is to be a comfortable war, at least by the standard of enemy aliens.
Elsa, then, is that thin plot standby, the tart with a heart of gold. And this, one must presume, is the problem -- a gold-digging Elsa would be fine, a plain brash and tarty Elsa would be fine, but an Elsa who proves to be nice turns the film into a piece of Zionist propaganda. Which is a piece of nonsense so crude it would be laughable were it not so insidious.
Interestingly, at the time of Tea with Mussolini's general release, Zeffirelli was keen to play up its autobiographical nature -- Luca, the illegitimate child, is the director's own stand-in. And he becomes, predictably, something of a hero. But then film directors, generally, have large egos, second only to opera directors; combine both roles -- which Zeffirelli famously does -- and the ego swells to Nietzschean proportions. And it is useful to keep this fact in mind when viewing Tea with Mussolini, lest one mistake the wealth of authentic period detail with a version of historical veracity.
Mussolini is portrayed as a buffoon, English women as elderly, wildly eccentric and politically naive -- Lady Random is besotted with the Italian dictator, and on the basis of having once taken Tea with Mussolini is convinced it is he, and not Elsa, who has organised the comforts they enjoy while being detained -- while Elsa is a worldly, and essentially nice women, who almost fatally falls for a cad. Stock types, all. And while the clearly delineated outlines of their cardboard characters make them the perfect inhabitants for the director's nostalgically evoked youth, that very cardboardiness becomes yet another reason to object to film opening an international film festival of repute.
A host of legitimate reasons, then, for anyone wishing to object to Tea with Mussolini as a festival opener. Sadly, the one illegitimate reason is the reason chosen by the Alexandria festival. And in doing so it has shot itself, and its reputation, in the foot. The festival is, obviously, in desperate need of getting its act together. But in the meantime, perhaps it should consider designating a new category of film, to pre-warn the audience of the dangers. This film contains a sympathetic character who, by accident of birth, happens to be Jewish, non-practising, completely secular, totally irreligious, could then be emblazoned on cinema hoardings just to make sure the audience knows it is facing a dangerous piece of pro-Zionist propaganda.
