Movie Review	Movie Reviews Archive

Tea with Mussolini
Franco Zeffirelli, director; Franco Zeffirelli and John Mortimer, writers; with Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Lily Tomlin, Judi Dench, Cher, and Charlie Lucas

How to order

At first glance Tea With Mussolini looks like the perfect gay summer movie. Not only are there a few cute boys and stunning Florentine architecture, but the cast headliners are a cavalcade of gay favorites: Cher, Maggie Smith, Lily Tomlin, Joan Plowright, Judi Dench. It is probably the only film this season that features three Dames (the British members of the cast). It also, one might argue, features as well an American dame (Cher) and sports Lily Tomlin's first performance playing a fictional lesbian. On top of that, Tea is directed by Franco Zeffirelli-- noted over-the-top opera queen-- who brought us such demi-spectaculars as the 1968 flower-child Romeo and Juliet and the 1990 Mel Gibson Hamlet. Clearly the man has class.

View our poll archive

Unfortunately, at second glance, Tea With Mussolini is a badly made, appallingly written, and politically squalid little disaster of a movie. Written by Zeffirelli, in conjunction with John Mortimer (of Rumpole of the Bailey fame), it is an autobiographical retelling of the director's boyhood and teen years in 1930s Florence, where he was informally adopted by a group of British women referred to as the scorpioni for their biting wit and stinging remarks. Much of the film is a vague collage of semi-sketched portraits of these women. Mary (Joan Plowright) takes the young Luca (Charlie Lucas) under her wing after his unmarried mother dies and his father stops caring for him; Hester (Maggie Smith) is a haughty, imperious wife of a late ambassador who fancies herself having influence over Il Duce because they once met and had tea; Arabella (Judi Dench) is a slightly dotty art devotee who never seems to notice that there is a war going on. Along with these dames are Georgie (Lily Tomlin), a wise-cracking American archeologist who plays referee to the group's bitch-fighting, and Elsa (Cher), a Jewish American art collector who has a heart of gold and an eye for early Picassos.

But very little acting goes on here because there is so little substance to the script. Characterization is obscure and blurry, and while the actors give it all they have-- a considerable accumulation of talent-- it ends up looking like facial ticks and shop-worn mannerisms. But what else are they to do? Zeffirelli is less interested in his women as people and more as slightly campy caricatures, old-time queeny notions of what flamboyant older women should be-- Auntie Mames without the wit.

This is not enough for a full-length film, so, inevitably, plot happens. Mussolini takes power. Luca grows up. The fascisti begin to take over Florence. War breaks out. The scorpioni are placed under house arrest. Elsa's life is threatened when the Italian fascists begin to emulate, to a lesser degree, Hitler's move toward a final solution.

There is much intrigue. But Zeffirelli cannot deal with the reality of Mussolini and Italian (and by implication, German) fascism. At best, this is because he is too short-sighted and self-involved to ground his story in harsh historical reality. The "evil" of fascism ends up meaning that a bunch of charming, older British women are inconvenienced and treated shabbily by a dictator. But at worst, you have the feeling, it is because Zeffirelli actually has a certain fondness for the period.

Let's not forget that this is the man who has, in recent years, become a powerful, vocal opponent of any progressive political change and a bulwark of right-wing conservative values.

In 1987, when the Roman Catholic church and many right-wing American fundamentalists were protesting the "blasphemy" of Martin Scorsese's great film The Last Temptation of Christ, it was Zeffirelli who denounced the film as a "product of the Jewish cultural scum of Hollywood." No wonder there is a political ambivalence in Tea With Mussolini.

When you think of what other Italian directors have done with this period-- Rossellini's beautiful Open City, Bertolucci's magnificent masterpieces The Conformist and 1900, Passolini's terrifying Salo-- the shortcomings of Zeffirelli's work is obvious. There is no reason why you can't make a social comedy out this material and time-- Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be is a brilliant comedy about Nazism. But first you have to take the subject seriously, to see fascism's squalid reality, and this Zeffirelli is unwilling or unable to do. The result: a handful of great actors are misused, history is distorted, and the opportunity to make an important, or maybe only decent, film gets lost. **

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com