Lina Wertmüller's concerns are large and unchanging—sex, honor, politics, survival—but her exploration of them is habitually so ironic, shifting, and ludicrous, and takes such unexpected turns, that people sometimes get her wrong. Her movies knock us off balance, because they can be appallingly funny or brutally satiric at one moment and wrenchingly sad at the next, or grotesque and exaggerated in their juxtapositions and suggestions but simple and reduced in their conclusions…. Miss Wertmüller's men and women—her men, particularly—are constantly being presented with farcically or gravely difficult questions, and I believe she presents a similarly hard choice to the moviegoer, which is whether to cling to the strong reactions one sometimes feels welling up in mid-movie and to stop and pull back at that point or to hear her out—to live her out—until the end and then begin to deal...