Wertmüller has made films that are both vilified and steadfast in their moral convictions, condemned and loved, with endings as dark as ink before the comedic beats.
The last two come from Wertmüller himself.
“I think I have two souls,” Wertmüller told Criterion in 2017 before reminiscing about her films. “One is playful, sarcastic, has a sense of humour. The other is exposed to the dramatic face of life and human problems around the world. Two natures live within me and never give up. My films may unconsciously reflect this personality.”
Her films are divisive, but she has found an international audience: She is the first woman to be nominated for a best director Oscar for “Seven Beauties.”
Her movies are politically minded sex antics
Friends introduced her to respected filmmaker Federico Fellini, with whom she worked on “8 ½” as his assistant director. She went on to film her first film, “The Lizards,” with many of the crew members she met on “8 ½”.
But it was not until “The Seduction of Mimi” that her films began to receive international acclaim. In the film, a disenfranchised worker falls in love with communism and a woman who isn’t his wife, loses his politics along the way, commits adultery multiple times, and ends up single. , is the father (or father character) of several children. . It features frequent collaborators Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato.
Wertmüller told Bramesco in 2017 that “without a doubt, sensuality and eroticism are part of Italian cinema.” But she used sex as a lens to explore class dynamics and gender politics.
In the 1974 film “Swept Away,” she pits a wealthy woman on vacation against a train driver who despises her politics, then reverses their power dynamics when the pair become become fugitives. The film was later remade by Guy Ritchie, starring then-wife Madonna, and went viral.
In “Seven Beauties,” her international foray is set during the Second World War, a murder, rape, and escape from the war to save the honor of her family solely for his efforts. are all useless. The film earned her four Academy Award nominations in 1977, including her historic nod for best director and best original screenplay.
Her characters are often people who lose their politics, their morals, or are willing to abandon them without much thought. She told Interview that: “Irony is my faithful companion. It helps me to erase the vices and defects of people.”
She’s controversial because of difficult topics
“I can only say that many of my films are about social issues that still exist,” she said in an interview with RogerEbert.com. “That means maybe they can still talk today.”
At the time of the 2017 interviews, she hadn’t acted in a film for over a decade, but she did appear as the subject of a documentary released that year – “Behind the Scenes”. white glasses”. She also directed the production of “Macbeth” that year.
In 2019, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and received an honorary Oscar.
