Simple-minded in Turin and Catania Lina Wertmüller's social tragicomedies are usually built on a very simple and ancient comedy trick - quid pro quod, then she passes some characters for quite others and builds a comical, and often melodramatic effect on exposing the true essence. So fall in love with each other, her characters and heroines, embodying opposites - Swiss multimillionaire Mariancela Melato and mafiosi Michele Placido in "Summer Night with a Greek profile, almond-shaped eyes etc..," a rich bitch of the same Melato and a fierce macho proletarian Giannini in "Distressed by an extraordinary fate in the azure sea..," so as not to quote the full names in a line with a ponytail. Opposites change places as the plot develops. A brutal gangster is thwarted with love for his kidnapper, whose ambitions and capitalist class consciousness are undermined by a breathtaking erotic interest.
So in "Mimi-metallurg" hot Sicilian Giancarlo Giannini, who did not want to vote for the candidate of the mafia, in fact - a coward and a mummy, for whom a net on the hair and a mixer - the height of dreams of social prestige, and the defeated anarchist Mariangela Melato (this is the first duet of actors in Wertmuller, before "Breathed to the Azure Sea"), which, like almost all the heroines of Melato, will not fit into his pocket, is actually a shy virgin love. But it would be too easy if it actually was. Who in the end will the characters turn out to be, which of their two natures - ostentatious or intimate - are they ultimately more true? And that the guise and the secret individuality can easily change places and with the same certainty can claim the truth or, rather, the place of truth – the postmodern skepticism that characterizes the work of Wertmüller.
Like Ettore Skole in The Terrace, like Elio Petri, whose film The Working Class Goes to Paradise has much in common with Mimi the Metallurgist, Lina Wertmüller confronts the themes of class struggle and communist symbolism with the carnival fullness of life, where the bodily bottom can literally occupy almost the entire screen, as in the scene of Mimi the seduction of a monstrous female bore. Similar trends go back to Pasolini’s work, but differ from him with a greater degree of skeptical irony and more frank humor. Disappointment in social struggle is reflected in the films of Wertmüller, Petrie, Scola and Marco Ferreri, and this explains the “baroque” poetics of too long titles, grotesque scenes, piling up emblems. After all, the Baroque historically expressed precisely skepticism towards systems of signifying reality, their detachment from the immediate imitative, mimetic function, their exaggeration in an emancipated form. The antitheses of these sign systems become game systems, because any game is built on antagonism, antithesis. However, some of the antagonisms are stable in the work of Wertmüller and probably reflect her attitude. After all, in addition to the invariable Decameron pair of opposites, designated by the letters Em and Jo, Wertmüller often plays the other - the opposite of the north and the south, as in "Summer Night with a Greek Profile...", "Ferdinand and Carolina", "Pasqualino Seven Beautiful" - and in this film.