Ihope Lina Wertmuller doesn't mind that
I'm unsure of the spelling of her name. One of Italy's
great film directors, her full name is Arcangela
Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Español von Braueich.
("Lina" is a diminutive nickname for Arcangela.)
It is common to see Italian and English spellings of her
name on film posters with u instead of the German
ü. I don't know how she signs her name. I missed my
two and only chances at the Ravello festival a few years
ago. I was having a coffee at a street-side table when she
passed me and walked into the pharmacy next door to the
coffee bar. She actually looked at me, smiled and nodded
"Good morning" as she passed. Chance #2 was that evening.
She was sitting at the table next to ours in a restaurant
in Ravello; I could have interrupted her dinner and
erudite conversation with other film heavies to ask for
her autograph so I could check the spelling. My
wife prodded me: "Go ahead, be a boor! Go ahead and
embarrass us, you tourist." But even I am not that gauche,
so I didn't do it. (To console myself, however, I picked
up a pretty nice gouacheof old-time
Ravello!)
The first one of her films I ever saw was called Travolti
da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (Swept
Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August,
commonly shortened in the English title to Swept
Away...)She loves whimsically long titles!I do know a few Italians who remember the whole title,
but most of them stop after destino or simply
call it "That Wertmuller film where Giancarlo Giannini and
Mariangela Melato wind up on the deserted island." It's
from 1974; she both wrote and directed the film. Melato
plays a rich, bored, arrogant, northern Italian young
woman on a vacation cruise in the Mediterranean. She and
one of the crew, Giannini —a poor, Communist, clueless
macho male pig from southern Italy— get stranded on an
island. Their social roles are reversed as he takes over
their struggle to survive, a struggle that includes her,
but only if she submits to him, which she does. The film
was all sex and politics; some saw class warfare and some
saw violence against women. Some even saw a love story.
The film was delightful and outrageous at the same time.
Wertmuller was born in Rome
and started her show business career touring in a
puppet show. In 1962 she met Federico Fellini and got her
big break, becoming assistant director on his film, 8½.
Since that time she has either written or directed (often
both) dozens of feature films and documentaries for the
cinema or television. Her films tend to be politically and
socially relevant, but you never have the feeling that you
are being preached at. Or, if you have that feeling, you
can overlook it because the story is good. Her work is
hilarious, tragic, and bizarre and sometimes all of those
together; visually, her films are stunning and have a
quality common to films from some other Italian directors;
that is, you can stop the film anywhere, cut out the
frame, blow it up and hang it on the wall as a work of
art.
She is not the first Italian woman to be recognized as a
great film director (that would be Elvira
Notari), but she is the first woman (of any
nationality) to receive an Academy Award nomination for
Best Director. It was for a 1975 film called, in English,
Seven Beauties, and, in Italian, Pasqualino
Settebellezze. "Settebellezze" is the nickname of
the hero, Pasqualino Frafuso, played by Giancarlo
Giannini; he is a small-time Neapolitan hoodlum who, in
order to get out of jail during WWII, goes into the
Italian army. He is sent north to fight alongside Italy's
German allies; he deserts, is captured by the Germans and
winds up in a concentration camp. The camp is run by a
woman, a character loosely based on the real-life,
infamous "Bitch of Buchenwald," Ilse Koch. The film is
about survival and is chilling. The camp commandant is
played by Shirly Stoler; she is so malignantly evil that
you can forget all other film villains you have ever seen.
I don't know if all great films must have a signature
scene, but this one does. Giannini's character decides
that the only way he can survive is by seducing the
commandant. She goes along with it, and together they
produce one of the ugliest scenes of human sexual
activity—call it "anti-love making"—ever filmed.
Lina Wertmuller is now in her eighties and still quite
active. Her last film (made for TV) was in 2010 and called
Mannaggia alla miseria (roughly, To Hell with
Poverty). It's based on the work of Muhammad Yunus,
the economist from Bangladesh who won a Nobel Prize in
2006 for developing the concepts of microcredit in order
to help entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional
bank loans. The film is about trying to set up a system
like that in Naples. Obviously, it's a comedy.
Lina Wertmuller has written a few books, including her
autobiography, published in 2006. Delightfully, it has a
title as long as those of some of her films because it
consists of her name, an even longer version than the one
in the first paragraph of this page since it also contains
her married name; thus, Arcangela Felice Assunta
Job Wertmüller von Elgg Español von
Brauchich cioè [that is] Lina Wertmuller. It
includes a CD of 32 songs that she sings, herself.