Lina Wertmüller

Today in Rome a funeral is being held for Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Braueich-Job, better known simply as Lina Wertmüller. She died on Thursday at the age of 93. Her name, like the full titles of her films, is like a treatise.(1) Rome was also where she was born in 1928 to an aristocratic Swiss family. As often happens to aristocrats in Italy, however, she was a lifelong leftist. Of the twenty-four films she wrote and directed from 1963 to 2004, I’ve been lucky enough to see nine. 

She first gained notice as assistant to Fellini on 8 1/2, and enjoyed a brief but extraordinary creative burst in the '70s that resulted in four films that are superb by any but the most obtuse standards: Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore (The Seduction of Mimi-1972), Film d'amore e d'anarchia, ovvero 'stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza...' (Love and Anarchy-1973), Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (Swept Away-1974)), and Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties-1975). 

These four films are bristling with ideas - about men and women, about history, about politics - that are idiosyncratic as well as manifestly serious. Some critics, political naïfs, claimed her politics were "schematic" and her films like pamphlets. Wertmüller is, in fact, a far more interesting politically committed filmmaker than Ken Loach because her politics is a long way from being doctrinaire. Her best film, Seven Beauties, remains controversial, and was attacked for its appropriation of an otherwise untouchable subject, Nazi labor camps, in a serious and inventive examination of the lengths to which one not very likable or admirable man will go to survive. In his attack on the film, Bruno Bettelheim, eminent child psychologist and camp survivor, took offense at Wertmüller's supposed suggestion that surviving the camps required a betrayal of one's humanity.(2) Wertmüller's point, I think, was that her film is about one man's betrayal of his own humanity. The burlesque manner of that betrayal - scraping together his last bits of libido to make love to an obese and sadistic woman, betrays Wertmüller's design and exposes her very impure protagonist as the monster that he knows he is. 

Because her films were more interested in people than just women, Wertmüller was of no use to feminist critics, who accused her of reinforcing stereotypes. And because she so swiftly went into decline after answering the dreaded call of Hollywood (A Night Full of Rain-1978), it was all the easier to downplay her importance. Her work lost much of its vitality and urgency in the '80s and she only regained commercial attention once with the uncharacteristically sentimental Ciao, Professore! (Io speriamo che me la cavo-1992). If nothing else, the pointless remake of Swept Away (2002), with an utterly unalluring Madonna and Adriano Giannini, son of Giancarlo made the original seem all the more like a masterpiece. 

I think Wertmuller was a candidate for neglected because her films concentrate on often unsympathetic male characters and the women who are drawn to them - and because of Wertmuller's refusal to approve of their actions. The hero of Seven Beauties (I use the word “hero” purely in its rhetorical sense) is a former pimp who survives a German concentration camp by summoning the strength to copulate (there is no better word for it) with the obese female camp commandant. The hero of Swept Away is a stupid Neapolitan deck hand whose superior strength and skill allows him to dominate a particularly useless rich woman with whom he is stranded alone on an island. The hero of Love and Anarchy is a foolish, spotty-faced provincial whose sole chance at being an anarchist hero is through an absurd and hare-brained plot to assassinate Mussolini. Because Wertmuller has a jaundiced view of human beings, her complex, powerful films are difficult for critics to pigeonhole. Her star rose and set in a painfully short arc in the mid-70s. No sooner had we been surprised by the appearance of The Seduction of Mimi in 1976 than we were disappointed by the big-budget, all-star Blood Feud in 1980. 

Until the invention of video, films were permitted very brief shelf-lives. If no one recalls Lina Wertmuller's films, it's the fault of film critics, not audiences. 

(1) Her full name is so long that in their obit Variety misidentified it as Arcangela Felice Assunta Job Wertmüller von Elgg Espanol von Brauchich. 

(2) "If ["Seven Beauties"] is to be taken for mere entertainment, I must state my disgust that the abomination of genocide and the tortures and degradations of the concentration camp are used as a special, uniquely macabre titillation to enhance its effectiveness. . . . I also believe that "Seven Beauties" is a somewhat uneasy, indirect, camouflaged—and therefore more dangerous, because more easily accepted and hence more effective—justification for accepting the world that produced concentration camps; it is a self-justification for those who readily accepted that world under these conditions and profited from it." Bettelheim, "Wertmüller, Lina 1928–" Bettelheim took his own life in a nursing home in 1990 by pulling a plastic bag over his head.