RaveVlog

“I can’t sleep, there are too many unanswered questions” begins the opening narration, introducing the wandering mind of its director to the world. “The Basilisks” is about young men in Southern Italy (her favorite location) trying to find a bedroom to keep warm in long enough to stay out of trouble. The place seems charming enough (half the town are introduced napping), what with the kindly former good time girl called Long Legs and the old men dozing in front of the abandoned communist youth center, but things are bad here. One of the men dreams of escaping to Rome, but he comes back to brag about his life so quickly he doesn’t get a foothold there. And then stays because in Rome no one cares that he’s been to Rome. The boys argue about everything, including a purported assault. Apparently, a peasant girl was raped by her landlord’s son, who now has to raise the kid. It’s suggested she enjoyed it, and that it was pretty convenient to get pregnant by the landlord’s kid, because now the landlord’s part of the family. They shrug. “Poverty is tough!”

This sounds dark (and it is, especially when you consider that at the time Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” was treated with scorn usually reserved for pornography when it debuted a few years prior) but this was the first crow of the cock. Lina Wertmüller had not even begun to spread her wings. Wary of being pigeonholed she contacted Nino Rota, Fellini’s pet composer, and the two of them adapted Wertmüller’s mother’s favorite children’s book Il Giornalino de Gian Burassaca as a limited TV series. Her friends suspected Wertmüller’s mother loved the books so much because Wertmüller herself was like the mischievous lead character, an Italian answer to the likes of Eloise or Harriet the Spy.

In the later part of the ‘60s she made a few tame sex comedies (and worked a few days on “The Belle Star Story,” starring Elsa Martinelli and recidivist porn star George Eastman) while she started collecting the personalities that would make up her closest circle for the rest of her days. She was taken with the work of a man named Enrico Job, a talented artist, a talented artist (perhaps she saw the same exuberance of those Flash Gordon panels she so loved as a child) and she not only changed his life by turning him into a production designer, she married him, bore him a daughter, and they stayed together until his death in 2008. She met designers and directors (she was great friends with Francesco Rosi) but most importantly she met two actors whom she was desperate to mold: Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato. They had the eager open features of newborn puppies and the baroque ferociousness of drunken Rottweilers. They were intense, they were hungry, and they were ready for their director to make them stars.

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