Two Souls

January 2, 2022 9:30 AM

Italian director Lina Wertmüller (Seven Beauties, Love & Anarchy, Swept Away), first woman nominated for Best Director Oscar, died last month at 93.

“During the 1970s, Lina Wertmüller emblazoned her name into the pantheon of Italian cinema with a series of intensely polemical, deeply controversial and wonderfully entertaining films. Among the most politically outspoken and iconoclastic members of the second generation of postwar directors — the direct heirs to the neo-realists — Wertmüller was also one of the first woman directors to be internationally recognized and acclaimed.

"Armed with a keenly satiric and Rabelaisian humor, [she] reinvented the narrative forms and character types of Italian comedy to create one of the rare examples of a radical, politically galvanized cinema that managed to achieve widespread popularity. Indeed, the fierce invectives against social, cultural and historical inequities at the heart of Wertmüller’s mid-1970s masterworks ‘Love and Anarchy,’ ‘Seven Beauties’ and ‘Swept Away’ seemed only to help the films find an appreciative audience, especially in the United States.”
-From Harvard Film Archives' The Disorder of Things: A Lina Wertmüller Retrospective

Grotesque Poetry: A Conversation with Lina Wertmüller, 2017 Criterion Interview

Crisis-women: Prostitution and Capitalist Modernity in Lina Wertmüller’s ‘Love and Anarchy’, Another Gaze

'Seven Beauties,' Wertmüller's Finest, 1976 New York Times review

Walk of Fame Honoree Lina Wertmüller Is Having a Ball, 2019 Variety interview

LINA WERTMULLER IN LOVE, 1992 Washington Post profile

Currently streaming from Wertmüller on Kanopy

posted by youarenothere (11 comments total)

"Really, there are two strands — two souls — which co-exist in my work: the lighthearted one associated with musical comedies and the more socially conscious one. They are both deeply part of my nature."
-Wertmüller

The quote above really captures the tonal balance I adore so much about her work. Anyone who bristles or recoils from her films: I completely understand. Her entire canon should come with a content warning and I think if I had encountered it even a moment earlier in my life, I wouldn't have been able to stomach much of what she does.

Nota bene, I will always have infinite thanks for the woman who brought both Mariangela Melato and Giancarlo Giannini into my life.

Of the greats, it's Love & Anarchy for me; of the "lessers" I am partial to the ribald Summer Night with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil, which goes understandably unmentioned in the retrospectives above and maintains the typically Wertmüllerian themes while integrating a lighter camp, caper tone. I was lucky enough to lap up The Basilisks when it was streaming on Mubi recently—seeing her in a more restrained, neo-realist style at the beginning of her career was a treat. A bit of a bagatelle compared to the classic of the genre, but engaging enough (and! Morricone score!) if you, like me, find that peripatetic post-war film mired in the cynical promises of progress almost always have a beauty.

To fuck, to fight, to fall in love, to be brutalized, to believe in nothing, to have too much power, not enough, just some, to believe in everything, fascism, pure ideology, honor, machismo, poverty, desire, revolutionary anger, political disgust, everything for sale, repression, anarchy, hunger, lust of every kind, simple survival—she whipped it all up gloriously into pure cinema. Thank you, Wertmüller.
posted by youarenothere at 9:31 AM on January 2, 2022 [6 favorites]

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posted by Rash at 10:46 AM on January 2, 2022

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posted by quazichimp at 12:08 PM on January 2, 2022

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posted by sammyo at 2:08 PM on January 2, 2022

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posted by Splunge at 2:12 PM on January 2, 2022

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posted by Obscure Reference at 2:52 PM on January 2, 2022

The ones who don’t enjoy themselves even when they laugh.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who worship the corporate image not knowing that they work for someone else.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who should have been shot in the cradle.
Pow! Oh, yeah.
The ones who say follow me to success but kill me if I fail, so to speak.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who say we Italians are the greatest he-men on earth.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who are from Rome.
The ones who say that’s for me.
The ones who say, you know what I mean.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who vote for the right because they’re fed up with strikes.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who vote white in order not to get dirty.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who never get involved with politics.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who say, be calm. Calm.
The ones who still support the king.
The ones who say, yes, Sir.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who make love standing in their boots and imagine they’re in a luxurious bed.
The ones who believe Christ is Santa Claus as young man.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who say: Oh, what the hell.
The ones who were there.
The ones who believe in everything… even in God.
The ones who listen to the national anthem.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who love their country.
The ones who keep going, just to see how it will end.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who are in garbage up to here.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who sleep soundly, even with cancer.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who even now don’t believe the world is round.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
The ones who’re afraid of flying.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who’ve never had a fatal accident.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who’ve had one.
The ones who at a certain point in their lives create a secret weapon, Christ.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who are always standing at the bar.
The ones who are always in Switzerland.
The ones who started early, haven’t arrived and don’t know they’re not going to.
Oh, yeah.
The ones who lose wars by the skin of their teeth.
The ones who say, everything is wrong here.
The ones who say, now let’s all have a good laugh.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.

Thank you Lina Wertmuller for blowing my mind when I was 17 and saw Seven Beauties for the first time, and for writing lines which have returned to me often ("The ones who think Christ is Santa Claus as a young man", especially). RIP.

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posted by jokeefe at 4:38 PM on January 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

And here's the opening sequence of Seven Beauties (with English subtitles). It's well worth watching, and the last five years has given it new resonance. Note: war footage, dead soldiers in the snow, explosions.
posted by jokeefe at 6:58 PM on January 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Let's Talk About Men, black and white, dark humor. Giancarlo Giannini was in the last Bond film, and also spoke at Wertmüller's funeral. When I was a late teen, I stumbled onto her films. Whoa the interpersonal dynamics were educational. You might say she helped to de-educate me.
posted by Oyéah at 7:15 PM on January 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oh, I have to share this with my dad. He and my mom -- who died in October -- drove 80 minutes each way to see Wertmuller's sexual and political satire The Seduction of Mimi, or Mimi the Metalworker Wounded in Honor (with Giancarlo Giannini in the title role) when it came to Maine in the mid-1970s. They even had dinner beforehand, at what I think was Portland's first vegetarian restaurant. A big night out in the pre-VCR, pre-Netflix, pre-foodie Portland era.

For Mom, daughter of a refugee from Fascist Italy, to see another paesan -- if only on the screen -- also may have been something of a comfort. Northern New England was particularly white bread then and when we moved to Maine, someone in our small town took note of Mom's WASPy marital surname and asked her if she'd be interested in joining the DAR. She turned them down, choosing not to share my father's joke that she should start the Daughters of the Garibaldi Revolution in honor of the leader of the movement that united Italy in the mid-1800s.
posted by virago at 7:42 PM on January 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

Writing for Diabolique magazine in 2017, Samm Deighan acknowledges Wertmuller's contributions to cinema in a way that I haven't really seen elsewhere, in her accessible yet substantial two-part series "The Seduction of Giancarlo Giannini: Lina Wertmüller in the 1970s":

Known for her explorations of political and sexual themes—with onscreen sexual and romantic relationships often serving as allegories for political conflicts—Italian director Lina Wertmüller has often been unfairly neglected alongside contemporaries like Fellini, Pasolini, Bunuel, and other male directors working with similarly transgressive and surreal material. Wertmüller primarily established this reputation with a series of four films made in quick succession in the early ‘70s: The Seduction of Mimi (1972), Love and Anarchy (1973), Swept Away (1974), and Seven Beauties (1975). These films star, in varying combinations, her two key muses from the period, Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato, often featured in roles as loners or outcasts who are at odds with middle and working class life in 1970s Italy.

In general, these films are set during either the wartime or postwar years, when Italy was going through rapid social and economic changes and the conservative values of the early part of the century were replaced by an obsession with luxury, commerce, and new social freedoms. A once rural country speckled with isolated city states became gradually more urban and the so-called peasant cultural values celebrated by someone like Pasolini became pushed into the margins of Italian life. With these four films, Wertmüller is certainly concerned with these developments, but particularly focuses on sexual politics and the changing landscape of Italian sexual identity. She uses themes like infidelity, illicit desire, and unconventional relationships that fall outside the scope of traditional marriage to explore things like masculinity and the inherent fragility of machismo. This was certainly not an uncommon topic for Italian filmmakers in the ‘70s ... (but) Wertmüller particularly emphasizes the sexual appetites of women in relation to the inetto, or inept male protagonist. ...

posted by virago at 6:05 AM on January 3, 2022