At Emerson 105 China is Near

POLITICS, like everything else, begin at home. Bellocchio's China is Near proposes that politics never leave home either. A transitional political film, somewhere short of where Godard cinemarxism makes its break, it is an anti-allegory, a catalogue of Bellocchio's ideological don'ts.

Though in the last several years he has received wide critical support, Bellocchio is relatively unknown in America. This may result from the acutely Italian flavor of his movies. Where the French looked to Hollywood for their archetypes and developed a narrative freedom from that base, Belocchio has turned to the Italian comic opera. China is Near has the lineality, characterization and coincidence of the nineteenth century novel, and is thus unfashionably paced. Bellocchio employs this style to internally strengthen his characterization of politics mired in conflicts between self-interest and ideals.

The pivotal character, Vittorio, is a millionaire running on the democratic socialist ticket. A moderate, pinned between his Maoist brother and his conservative sister; his campaign for an education post is a dolorous exercise. But the conflict is set only superficially in political terms. Bellocchio wrote that the film was conceived in a geometric pattern, on parallel lines. The film's structure emphasizes the interconnections between layers rather than their contribution to an overall theme. The politicial layer lies nearest the surface, but it is little more than a hand-puppet to the film's sexual politics. It is oddly believable when Vittorio's aide Carlo, caught in the arms of a Countess by his lover, warns her that if she too wants to make it she must behave more coyly.

As the film progresses, Vittorio's political ambitions are pushed aside by the bedroom maneuvering of both Carlo and his secretary-mistress, hoping to become members of the aristocracy through forced marriages. In the end, Vittorio and his sister are trapped by their concern for reputation. Vittorio's social idealism is blindly sacrificed to aristocratic values.

China is Near is carefully measured by understatement and economy. Following the outline of classical comedy, humor grows from the naivete of individual characters. Camillo, the youngest and most naive, concludes that the revolution will be served by the death of his innocence. He arranges sex with a girl who goes into a hypnotic trance so complete that "her partners may be exchanged without her knowing it: a perfect experimental laboratory for us."

Camillo's false asceticism contrasts with Vittorio's irrepairably compromised humanitarianism, but no resolution is attempted.

Bellocchio has compiled a sourcebook of bourgeois shennanigans and ideological muddles that illuminate the inextricable unity of personal and political consciousness. When Carlo in an opening sequence says he can't love because he is aware there are classes with better material conditions for love, he is at once rationalizing his callousness and ambition and justifying a revolution that might free him from himself.

But he does not see the contradiction. Such an honest self-appraisal is precisely the intersection the characters of China is Near seek to avoid. Vittorio, living in a mahogany palace discussing socialism, concerned with denting a new car in the same moment that he oversees Maoist slogans being painted on the wall-all these dichotomies that beg to be resolved are not resolved, and the final, apparent integration of the classes through marriage is facile and meaningless.