Okay, I admit it: I just don't get it. Love and Anger, as a film, completely and utterly eludes me. It's alternately brilliant and idiotic, hilarious and depressing, subtle and pretentious. For those of you who, like me, find it difficult to appreciate film like this, you may as well keep moving. There's nothing for you here. For the rest of you, who may catch themselves pricking their ears up at the mention of Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Luc Godard, you're in for a treat.

Eschewing traditional narrative for bold imagery and slice-of-time continuity, Love and Anger is a collection of five short films, all linked (however loosely) with themes of love, anger, war, peace, socialism, capitalism...basically explorations of polar opposites.

The first segment, L'Indifferenza, is three smaller stories within itself. A woman is raped and stabbed in the courtyard of her tenement, while her neighbors sit idly by; people mill about city streets ignorant of the homeless sprawled across the sidewalk like corpses; a car-accident victim tries desperately to flag down a passing car to save his dying wife. If your Italian isn't too rusty, I'm sure you figured out that this short is about indifference, and it's probably the most accessible, as well as the most emotionally affecting of the anthology. When our nameless female victim cries out for help from her attackers, a neighbor turns up a baseball game to drown out her screams. The now-noticeable commentary, playing over the assault, draws an eerie parallel to the woman's plight. Even the car-crash victim, when he finally manages to flag down a car to help him bring his wife to the hospital (with the help of two motorcycle cops), winds up in the station wagon of a criminal, who reluctantly helps him and his wife, despite being put in harm's way with the police. The segment is quite good, although wholly depressing. The sight of the bloody man waving hopelessly at uncaring motorists is an image I won't soon forget for its bleakness and plausibility.

The next segment, L'Agonia, is art film at its most pretentious. In a series of gyrations, pantomimes, sparse dialogue, and animalistic bellows, the Living Theatre troupe enact The Death of God. At least, that's what's supposed to be going on. To be honest, I was finding myself getting far too annoyed with the troupe's antics to pay attention. Any message is quickly lost in a mass of wriggling bodies, mongoloid howls, cartoony retching, and sparse ham-fisted dialogue. Bernardo Bertolucci's spastic direction doesn't help matters much either, with inexplicable framing (one scene contained nothing more than a man's chin held in a very long shot) and choppy editing.

Next up is La Sequenza Del Fiore Di Carta, little more than a paper-thin character study of a young hippie named Riccetto as he skips merrily down the street, so enraptured by his own “innocence”(I call it ignorance) that he barely notices the horrors happening in the world around him. As footage of bombings, war, and political upheaval are superimposed in the frame, Riccetto dances with a giant flower, twirls around light posts, kisses girls, and ignores the pleas of God, as he warns Riccetto that even his innocence may not be enough to save him.

The segment sure to get the most attention, and rightfully so, is Jean-Luc Godard's L'Amore. Basically a cross-section of the discussions between two couples on topics like love, anger, war, peace, capitalism, socialism...deja vu, huh? Where Godard makes his short much more enjoyable is with its beauty. The conversations we're sitting in on, while a bit vague in concept, are linguistically stunning. Not only that, but Godard is first and foremost a filmmaker, and it shows in his great composition, mixing standard “talking head” framing with extreme closeups and beautiful shots of stones in a brook, stalks of grass, etc. You may not quite be able to sink your teeth into the proceedings, but the eye-candy makes it more than worthwhile.

Finally, we're given Discutiamo, Discutiamo, which comes pretty close to being comedy. Basically a mock debate between “The Establishment” (students wearing comical wigs and strap-on beards), and “The Proletariat,” (students chanting “Ho Chi Minh!”), it manages to exploit its severe lack of polish and amateurishness by almost being charming in its lo-fi nature. Actors chuckle their way through their lines, wigs are torn off and flung in anger, and whole chunks of dialogue are read directly off of stapled scripts. It perfectly captures the look and feel of a spontaneous classroom project. Even better, it does the unimaginable by not “taking sides” in the heated conflict of students-vs-professors so prevalent in the Sixties, instead showing both sides as being “right” in their own ways, but fundamentally flawed.

monstrous digital artifacts rear their pixelated heads, and L'Agonia had a very obvious dropout, but afterwards there's nothing but smooth sailing. Audio is touted as being “Italian mono,” but there's a wide array of languages on display here, including English, French, German, Spanish, and a host of other languages here and there. Of course, there's subtitles to help us out virtually every step of the way with a few exceptions. Audio was solidly mixed, with virtually no hiss or distortion. While moderately hollow (this is, of course, shot in 1968), there was never any question to the clarity of dialogue. Extras are very worth noting, with a second DVD devoted to a feature-length documentary with interviews with several major players (including directors Marco Bellocchio and Carlo Lizzani), as well as NoShame's signature “fat-ass booklet.” For those of you unfamiliar with NoShame's releases, they tend to supplement their DVD's with impressively thick booklets packed with biographies, filmographies, articles, poster art, and much more. I applaud them for offering up some nice reading material besides essays printed electronically on screen, and encourage other companies to follow suit. Hey, if I can bring part of a DVD for bathroom reading, more power to them!

While most certainly not for all tastes, and a little uneven in quality, Love and Anger is a mostly well executed avant-garde omnibus that represents the turbulent times of the late Sixties to a T. As I said before, you know if you'll appreciate this kind of cinema or not. If you can, then by all means, pick this up and love it, and love NoShame for giving it the treatment it deserves.