“Love and Anarchy”, that was her thing, was the title of one of her most successful films in 1973, about an assassination attempt on Mussolini that was planned in a brothel. Even back then, Lina Wertmüller wore glasses with white frames, a Gelsomina of the seventies, intellect and playfulness paired (“Irony is my loyal companion!”), Left-wing politics and drastic popular theater: The combination made many critics and movie buffs cheer, some became rather queasy included.
She was born on August 14, 1928, her father was a lawyer and came from an old noble family of Swiss origin. He didn’t like seeing his daughter studying theater, nor that she was interested in popular culture, including “Flash Gordon” and other comics. Lina Wertmüller worked as an actress, assistant director and set designer at various theaters, founded the Harlequin theater group in 1951. Her friend Marcello Mastroianni brought her together with Federico Fellini, she was assistant director for his “Eight and Half”. And then was allowed to make films himself, starting in 1063 with “The Basilisks”, about life in Basilicata in southern Italy: “I love the south, the sun, the sea.” In 1967 she made a western with the delicate, wonderful Elsa Martinelli as Belle Starr, “My body for a poker game”, in which the cowboys and their girls really have bodies, not just cocky gestures.
Wertmüller not only worked for the cinema, she staged “Carmen” at the Bavarian State Opera
Wertmüller’s films from the seventies are wild and pure exuberance, the titles alone leave you breathless: “Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto”, a rebellious robinsonade, in German it sounds a little stiffer: “Carried away by an unusual fate in the azure sea in August “.
The greatest success in 1976 was “Pasqualino Settebellezze”, in German “Seven Beauties”, the last of four films that she made with actor Giancarlo Giannini, all of them orgies against Italian masculinity, Pasqualino, a family man from Naples, does everything – really everything! – to himself and his own – seven sisters! – to preserve and prevent them from becoming prostitutes. He even works as a soldier and, after he comes to a concentration camp, as a sex object for the camp commandant (that is the massive Shirley Stoler, who began her film career as one of the “Honeymoon Killers” in the film of the same name, produced by Martin Scorsese). Wertmüller was nominated for a directing Oscar for “Pasqualino” as the first woman. Pauline Kael found the film misogynous and misanthropic, and disgusting.
In the seventies, cinema changed radically, demonstratively renouncing all forms of innocence. Europe’s young filmmakers played a major role in, even unintentionally, the Nouvelle Vague in France, which had set out to preserve or rediscover such innocence. After the end of the 1970s, Lina Wertmüller enjoyed international success, she wrote plays and staged operas (including a “Carmen” at the Bavarian State Opera). She died in Rome on Thursday at the age of 93.