Malaise

Disorder boasts an impressive roster of international film stars sloshing through still another odyssey of contemporary moral chaos. In this artiest of art films, the malaise reaches epidemic proportions. To make his points, fledgling Italian Director Franco Brusati borrows freely but not well from Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti and perhaps Bunuel, hopefully compiling a whole movie from the kind of footage the masters might have left out.

The first episode pries into a decadent country villa where wealthy Industrialist Curt Jurgens is dying upstairs while his son Sami Frey throws a wingding below. Suffering through the Oedipal conflict, language dubbing and dense cinematic trickery are Jurgens' wife Alida Valli and daughter Susan Strasberg. Among the more perceptive waiters hired for the revels is Hero Renato Salvatori, who abruptly exclaims: "What a house--lonely, sad, mean and rotten!" Salvatori heads home to Milan, only to find more moral chaos. Jean Sorel is so alienated that he goes to a party and seduces his own wife, luscious Antonella Lualdi, who clearly prefers Host Louis Jourdan. But Jourdan prefers a young man called Bruno, Salvatori's friend. Then, trying to get his mother out of the poorhouse, Salvatori meets a kindly, supposititious priest whose ramshackle home turns out to be a haven for prostitutes and transvestites. This last illusory retreat is literally and symbolically shattered when a demolition crew razes the place to make way for something new. Perhaps one of those sterile Milan apartment dwellings. The film's unwitting moral: people who stone glass houses deserve all the Disorder they get.

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