The sea and the sun-they were death.įor the film's creator, then, the intention is basically clear. And after I heard the story, I couldn't see Naples in the same way. “It seemed very important for us, very much of our times, this negative side of the life force, this deadly side of a life force that has no illumination, no intelligence, no civic sense. “It made a very strong impression on me-this story,” she continued. People think of me as very highly colored, very gaudy. “I don't like to be a speculator with these things. the story of this man in the concentration camp was too much. the story of this man in the asylum was too much. “His story was even worse,” Miss Wertmuller said. It grew, in fact, from her work on “The Seduction of Mimi.” One of the extras on the set had accomplished the same Dantean journey that Pasquale takes in the film-crime in Naples, internment in a mental hospital, being released to fight in the army, the concentration camp, forced sex with a woman camp official-and back to Italy to produce 15 children. “It's the same thing, the same family, the same speech,” she said. In both its reach and its grasp, “Seven Beauties” seems a quantum jump away from Miss Wertmuller's earlier films, although the family resemblance is strong. After seeing a film of the dimensions of “Seven Beauties,” one might find it parochial to ask-about on the order of asking Shakespeare what it was like to be a Warwickshire poet. She did not talk about what it was like to be a woman director, although she would if asked, her voice setting slightly. She talked in Italian, French and English, sometimes in the same sentence, about her films, about humanity, about fatness. Just as if it were a Naples tenement, the water pipes gurgled. Huddled in a gaudy tent of a dress, ropes of beads around her neck, rings on every available finger, whiterimmed glasses on her nose, she sat in an undoubtedly expensive suite at the Pierre Hotel. And paradox seems to take shape around her a rough equivalent to the tendency of lampposts suddenly to look sinister when Alfred Hitchcock walks by. Opposites always go together: Her villains or, rather, those who embody noxious ideas, are touched with some splendor or at least some humanity. Miss Wertmuller's films are a torrent of paradox. An abandoned paper mill, it stands on the site of a Roman temple of Hercules. That unforgettably cold, Baltic, foggy concentration‐camp barrack was in fact in Italy, near Tivoli. Lina Wertmuller's voice is reedy and hoarse, but she has the director's gift of communicating intention virtually without physical means - by willing it, almost.įog, in any case, was not available where it was supposed to be. The two sets of “tumtums” sounded almost identical, but the first was clearly a march and the second a fandango. They thought we were like this-tum‐tum, tum‐tum-when in reality we were like thistum‐tum, tum‐tum.” They didn't understand the spirit we Were working in. “Our film was about war,” she said, “and they thought it would have a heroic, an epic approach. She looked for it in Poland, and there was fog, but there were also problems. She looked for fog in Germany, but the sun persisted in shining. It pervades the concentration, camp where the living and the dead inhabit the same shade of gray. It pervades the German forest where soldiers machine gun Jews as casually and irritably as if they were burying garbage. Fog is one of the significant figures in her beautiful and terrifying new movie, “Seven Beauties.” It denotes the abstract, inhuman and sentimental North.
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