Lina Wertmüller Collection
Kino International, $89.95 (Blu-ray)
Director Lina Wertmüller, Italy’s agitprop feminist answer to Federico Fellini, is still alive and kicking at 85 years old, yet her place in the annals of cinema hardly feels assured. An early protégé of Fellini (she was the third assistant director on 8½), Wertmüller is probably best known to American arthouse denizens for 1975’s Seven Beauties, which earned her the distinction of being the first female filmmaker to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. Mention of Wertmüller’s other most name-checked film, 1974’s incendiary Swept Away, is depressingly likely to summon images not of Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato writhing on the Mediterranean sand, but of Madonna, contorting her bad self around Giancarlo’s real-life son Adriano in Guy Ritchie’s legendarily awful 2002 remake.
The Seduction of Mimi (1972) finds the elder Giannini – a Wertmüller regular – as the titular Mimi, a hapless Sicilian metalworker forced to go on the lam after he refuses to vote the Mafia party line in his hometown (in protest, he votes for the Communist candidate), thus setting up a farcical, typically surreal chain of events that Wertmüller uses to comment on everything from the outrageousness of contemporary Italian politics to the equally byzantine plottings of the macho male libido. Melato, as Mimi’s Communist lover, is divine. Absurdist elements abound, enveloping the hopelessly hangdog Mimi in a hyper-politicized, comic battle of the sexes – and, famously, there’s a lot of sex on display. (In a supremely surreal twist of Hollywood fate, Wertmüller’s film would later be “remade” as the 1977 Richard Pryor vehicle Which Way is Up? Pryor, it’s safe to say, was no Giannini.)
Love & Anarchy, the second disc in Kino’s collection, garnered a Palme d’Or nomination for the director and a Best Actor win for Giannini at Cannes ’73. Set in 1930s Italy, Giannini is Tunin, a farmer who joins the anti-fascist underground and is tasked with assassinating Il Duce. In preparation, he hides out in a brothel – run by Salomé (Melato, again ravishing) – which is also frequented by Mussolini’s chief of security, Spatoletti (Eros Pagni). Complications ensue, along with the requisite sex, death, and Wertmüller’s darkly humorous observations on the toxic effects of politics on idealists. Not as purely comic as Mimi, Giannini’s naive anarchist is like some cosmic cat-toy, batted first one way and then another until the final, chilling shot.
Less nihilistic by dint of its enormously entertaining leads, All Screwed Up is nevertheless another razor-sharp skewering of contemporary Italian mores, circa 1974. Southern immigrants to Milan seeking a better life, Gigi (Luigi Diberti) and Carletto (Nino Bignamini) secure a restaurant gig, move into a commune, and realize, too late, that class issues aren’t as easily shed as their clothes. The quest for a better life via upward mobility is lambasted again and again in All Screwed Up – the title is both a pun and an accurate description of the immigrants’ situation – and there are some scorchingly memorable set-pieces to devour, not the least of which is a highly choreographed slaughterhouse pseudo-ballet. Are we not men? We are meat! is the sinewy subtext. Ever the socio-political provocateur, Wertmüller critiques love (and life, and death), Italian-style, during a very specific era in her country’s history. An angry polemicist with an edgy eye and a rapier wit, the rise and (recent) fall of Silvio Berlusconi only serves to prove Wertmüller was right all along.
This article appears in June 22 • 2012.