[Most] of Love and Anarchy is played as farce, and quite successfully. Apart from the ending, the film's two most effective sequences are both quite straightforwardly comic ones: a long Sunday outing in the country with Tunin, the two whores, and the security chief (hilariously caricatured by Eros Pagni, something of a Mussolini look-alike); and a boisterous scene of Tunin having his first meal in the brothel…. And though one's final impression of Love and Anarchy is of a work in a tragicomic mode, the film achieves this effect not so much by a true mixture of moods, but by their drastic alternation. Things in it aren't (as they are in, say, a Seduced and Abandoned, or the films of Buñuel) an inseparable fusion of the funny and the horrible; they are funny, and then they turn horrible. The ending of the film, in particular, is almost...