The Irresistible Force and the Immutable Object

Be warned. "She's like 25 men," says her frequent leading lady, Mariangela Melato. "I've never seen so monstrous a vitality. When you work with Lina, you can forget you have personal problems, emotional states, responsibilities. You dedicate yourself entirely."

"We are two volcanoes," says Giancarlo Giannini, star of Seven Beauties (TIME, Jan. 26). "In terms of my work, she is the woman of my life. We are the same. Indefatigable. Slightly crazy. We exist for each other." Director Lina

Wertmuller herself offers still another characterization: "We are like two li ons." Fire, force, eruptive brilliance--all fit the collaborations and the collaborators themselves.

Seven Beauties, Wertmuller's cauter izing comedy of survival and desperation during World War II, was greeted with critical bouquets and land-office business at its Manhattan opening. Critic John Simon placed the director in "the highest regions of cinematic art." Not, at least, since Bernardo Bertolucci has a European film maker been so acclaimed in the U.S.

Wertmuller's work is audacious, abrasive, full of wild, coarse humor and high feeling. Unlike Bertolucci she is not a cinematic visionary. Her roots are more traditional. In Love and Anarchy, Wertmuller considered the short-fused political passion of a peasant (played by Giannini) who had come to Rome to assassinate Mussolini. In The Seduction of Mimi, she observed how a laborer (Giannini again) allowed his socialist politics to be bought off by employers and mobsters. Swept Away concerned a helplessly aggressive sailor (yes, Giannini) shipwrecked on a desert island with a wealthy woman (Melato).

The sailor abuses the woman, enacting sexual and emotional revenge for the humiliations visited by her social class on his and, inevitably, falls in love with her at the same time. Wertmuller's movies are about states of passion and the ways they change--and often corrupt --political allegiances and spiritual commitments.

At home in Italy, these movies and Wertmuller's others--there are ten in all--are spoken of with respect if not excitement. In France, they are mostly unseen. In England, those who know her work at all speak of it with indifference or hostility. "She is largely a New York phenomenon," shrugs Guardian Critic Richard Roud.

"She is a female misogynist masquerading as a political crusader," complains London Critic Alexander Walker, unfurling a battle flag that attracts many allies in America. Feminist Author Ellen Willis complains about the "perverse symbolism" in last year's Swept Away, claiming Wertmuller "panders to two classic male-supremacist lies: that women dominate men, and that women are parasites while men do all the work." Such arguments do not go down well with the director. "Men ought to picket my films in protest," she suggests. "Think of how they are portrayed in my films: all vain, arrogant and stupid, real chauvinists who believe in the superiority of the penis."

In the best traditions of show business, such controversy has only added a certain sinister luster to a reputation that has been growing wildly since the American release, in 1974, of Love and Anarchy. Earlier movies like The Seduction of Mimi and All Screwed Up found their way to theaters and attracted a tenacious following. It all may have to do with the brashness and ambition of Wertmuller's work, the interdependence of its energy and coarseness. Her movies stand in brazen contrast to the homogenized complacency of most Hollywood films. Seven Beauties has pulled down more than $100,000 at the New York box office in less than two weeks. If it does as well in subsequent releases--it is scheduled to open in Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles on March 10, and in approximately 40 additional cities by the end of April--it will be not only one of the most popular foreign films since Last Tango in Paris, but a healthy hit even by Hollywood standards.

All her recent films except All Screwed Up have been made with Giancarlo Giannini. His presence galvanizes her movies. His racked, searching eyes haunt them. "Those eyes are extraordinary," Wertmuller told TIME Correspondent Leo Janos. "They seem to contain an independent life force--as if they could scream, curse, plead, argue and make love." Giannini, like Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni before him, fulfills the perennial audience yearning for a romantic image and the abiding need for an adroit actor of humor and mercurial sensibility.

Beautiful Dialogue. For Wertmuller, however, Giannini is not just a star. He is a collaborator and confidant.

Actor and director thrashed out the script for Seven Beauties just the way they worked on Love and Anarchy and The Seduction of Mimi: in stormy, all-night sessions joined by Wertmuller's husband, Artist-Sculptor Enrico Job.

Then Wertmuller sits down at the typewriter and, she says, "writes so fast --rrrrrrr--that I sound like Gene Krupa." According to Giannini, the scripts that result have the heft of a telephone book. And there are two of them.

One version contains extensive dialogue scenes, the other no dialogue at all, representing Wertmuller's attempts to battle her early experience as a playwright and rely more on images. She will actually film two versions of all major scenes, one with talk, one without. "One of the most difficult decisions I've ever had to make was the courtroom scene in Seven Beauties. Between Pasqualino and the girl he eventually marries I had beautiful dialogue! Beautiful! But in the end I knew they had said everything just by looking at each other."

Wertmuller relies on Giannini as much on the set as off. They work out bits of business together, constantly confer between takes. "Lina and Giancarlo work together as if they were one being," says Job, who is also his wife's art director. "The same images dance in front of their eyes. They instinctively share similar visions."

Perhaps, but temperaments are another matter altogether. Gloomy, sardonic, private, Giannini, 33, has the drawn look of a hotel night manager facing dawn without a fresh pack of cigarettes. He shrugs with practiced pessimism about his new celebrity, claims his success and his $800,000-per-picture salary are mostly a burden. Wertmuller, appreciably his senior, nevertheless has the energy and spirit of the perennial younger sister. She dresses with the garish esprit of a Sunday painter going out to a sidewalk art show: loose peasant blouses, flowing patterned skirts, widescreen, white-framed glasses, and enough rings and costume jewelry to risk an excess-baggage charge on an overseas flight. "Not long ago," recalls Flora Mastroianni, Marcello's wife and a friend from childhood, "Lina turned up wearing this enormous silver object at her waist. It turned out to be an inkwell she'd found in an antique shop and had made into a buckle."

Boiling Blood. Wertmuller hardly permits herself a solitary moment. "First thing in the morning, I pick up the phone and call my friends," she says. "I want to find out what happened during the night while I was sleeping." The ebullience of her work also helps keep her in touch with her roots, refracts and probably even colors her own personal history, which, as she tells it, sounds suspiciously like a Wertmuller scenario.

She is the product of what she calls "boiling blood." Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmuller von Elgg was born in Rome "somewhere between 1812 and 1928, I'll never tell precisely." Her aristocratic great-great-grandfather fled Switzerland after fighting a duel over a woman and wound up in Naples. Since then, the family tree has shaken down into a sober succession of lawyers and doctors. Wertmuller likes to announce proudly: "I'm the last ballbuster left." But she admits that some of her feistiness comes from Maria, her "vital, crazy" mother. Three years ago, at 72, in the fiftieth year of her storm-tossed marriage, Maria handed Lina's autocratic father a suitcase. "Bastaf she cried. "Get out and be done with it!" And she meant it.

As a schoolgirl, Wertmuller already had a wholly individual notion of protest. Refused permission to leave the room because the school superintendent was coming for inspection, little Lina waited for his arrival, stood up and relieved herself by her desk. Later, she and a friend plotted revenge on an unpopular teacher by setting him afire as he drowsed. Despite this, her father wanted Lina to become a lawyer and put up fierce resistance when she expressed wishes to take lessons in acting and directing. She graduated from drama school in Rome in 1951 and found work in all sorts of theatrical pursuits from puppetry to stage managing to writing for radio and TV. After a decade, with the help of her old friend Flora, she met Federico Fellini, for whom she worked as an assistant on 8 1/2. "It was one of those experiences," she says now, "that open new dimensions of life." The relationship was more inspirational and intellectual than practical. "More than anybody," says Enrico Job, "it was Giancarlo who helped Lina to launch into films, introducing her to producers, backers and so on. Without him, she would probably still be waiting for a chance."

The friendship began in 1963, when Wertmuller saw Giannini, then 20, play Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The son of an electrical engineer, born near Genoa, brought up in Naples, Giannini became an actor out of sheer desperation. "I was so uncertain, so deeply involved with myself," he says.

"I thought of acting only as a last chance to try to communicate outwardly."

Studying to become an aeronautical engineer, Giannini was a friendless perfectionist who would often spread textbooks on the kitchen table to test their accuracy on a given point. One day when he was 15, an old man approached Giancarlo on a Naples street. He was a bookseller, a total stranger, and he told the boy about a group of students who had formed an amateur theater. "He was like a mysterious phantom messenger from a Bergman movie," Giannini says. "I'd never seen the old man before. I have not seen him since." That night, Giannini went to the theater, eventually joined the company by giving an audition reading from Hamlet.

By the time he and Wertmuller met, Giannini was already well on his way to becoming the brightest young stage star in Italy. In 1964 he played Romeo in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, then David Copperfield in an ambitious twelve-part television program, roles that made him a modest and rather reluctant matinee idol. He worked with Wertmuller for the first time in 1966 on a movie called Rita The Mosquito, which she directed under the name "George Brown." Two years later, Giannini starred in a Wertmuller play he had brought to Zeffirelli's attention. Zeffirelli staged it, Enrico Job did the sets and costumes. Wertmuller wound up married to the designer and working, again with Giannini, on The Seduction of Mimi.

Giannini still studies his parts in the same dogged way he used to crack his engineering books. "Details, details, details," he laments. "Perfection. I go too far." For Mimi, he spent weeks in Sicily armed with tape recorders and cameras, studying local speech and mannerisms. "Once I've formed an idea of a character," Giannini reports, "I confront him from the outside. I start with the spinal cord, which is basic to his carriage, his entire nervous system. I must decide how he stands and carries himself in the world. Next, his arms--how does he reveal himself through his arms?

Then his body rhythms--slower or faster than mine? Once all this is clarified, I'm prepared to hide myself inside."

The fulfillment of concealment: an actor's safest place. Giannini knows this well, confesses that he is "most alive standing in front of the camera, hearing the film whirring through its mechanisms." In between movies he goes off on solitary searches for some other kind of fulfillment. His eight-year marriage to Actress Livia Giampaolo raises as many doubts as it solves problems; his two young sons are a puzzlement as well as a joy. He has tried to paint, and had a one-man show of his abstracts in Milan that was successful. "Giancarlo," says Job, "has tried painting and come back sad.

He's tried skiing and come back sad.

He's tried swimming, nightclubbing, yoga and photography and come back sad. He is just sad."

The Great Prince. Currently, Giannini can also be cast down about work just completed (the starring role in the new Luchino Visconti film) and jobs offered, including several from Hollywood that tempt him because "my nature is to court glory or invite disaster."

His director is similarly beguiled by opportunities to work in America. Her credo that "I make films for the masses"--if not the socialist politics from which it springs--would go down just fine in Hollywood. Wertmuller is also wary, however, and knows that "this is a very, very dangerous time for me. Dealing with Hollywood studios is like being courted by a great prince. At first they're lovely, murmuring 'Oh, my sweet girl, how I adore you and want you.' I tell them, 'Ba fungoo!' They don't stop. They slip to their knees before you imploringly. But you can see in the brightness of their eyes that they know they are the great prince and in the end they are going to break your ass."

While Wertmuller wrestles with contract offers--including a three-picture deal with Warner Bros.--Giannini broods about "the instinct to reject anyone who is successful--true even for those who happen to love me very much.

The mask of success is a deception because behind it is hidden a very terrible face." At his bleakest moments, he swears that had he known where acting would lead him, he would have become an engineer. "Nonsense," says Lina Wertmuller. "Giancarlo was born to be an actor. He was born to work at my side. And I was born to work at his. Our fates are sealed."

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