Community Community A fungus linked Qatar Natural to dandruff in the History P4hair may worsen P16 Group intestinal disorders such (QNHG) organises a as inflammatory bowel talk on ‘Falconry in disease in patients with a Qatar’ at Doha English certain genetic makeup. Speaking School. Friday, March 8, 2019 Rajab 1, 1440 AH Doha today 160 - 260 COVER 90 and counting STORY First Oscar nominated female director Lina Wertmüller on her life and times. P2-3 CUISINE SHOWBIZ Non-fried spring rolls The next level: Shekhar, from Vietnam. Kabir eye digital space. Page 6 Page 15 2 GULF TIMES Friday, March 8, 2019 COMMUNITY COVER STORY Total recall Italian film-maker Lina Wertmüller broke ground when she was Oscar nominated for Seven PRAYER TIME Beauties, but her films were never calculated to Fajr 4.35am Shorooq (sunrise) 5.51am Zuhr (noon) 11.45am win mainstream appeal, writes Claire Armitstead Asr (afternoon) 3.08pm Maghreb (sunset) 5.41pm Isha (night) 7.11pm USEFUL NUMBERS Emergency 999 Worldwide Emergency Number 112 Kahramaa – Electricity and Water 991 Local Directory 180 International Calls Enquires 150 Hamad International Airport 40106666 Labor Department 44508111, 44406537 Mowasalat Taxi 44588888 Qatar Airways 44496000 Hamad Medical Corporation 44392222, 44393333 Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation 44845555, 44845464 Primary Health Care Corporation 44593333 44593363 Qatar Assistive Technology Centre 44594050 Qatar News Agency 44450205 44450333 Q-Post – General Postal Corporation 44464444 Humanitarian Services Offi ce (Single window facility for the repatriation of bodies) Ministry of Interior 40253371, 40253372, 40253369 Ministry of Health 40253370, 40253364 Hamad Medical Corporation 40253368, 40253365 Qatar Airways 40253374 ote Unquo Qu te “Think like a queen. A queen is not ina Wertmüller’s fi rst job in fi lm was to scout afraid to fail. Failure is another out interesting faces for Federico Fellini. The Critics will Italian master was at the height of his success; stepping stone to greatness.” she was an ambitious young puppeteer more say what interested in snatching her own location — Oprah Winfrey Lfootage than honouring the duties of an assistant critics director. “I was the worst assistant, but that was overlooked because I was likeable,” she says. say. I have The fi lm was 8½, the tale of a fecklessly promiscuous never been director abandoned by his muse. It wasn’t long before Wertmüller had cast her own mother and her card concerned circle of elegant socialites, who went on to be fl eetingly Community Editor immortalised playing canasta on a beach, in the 1963 fi lm with success listed by Sight & Sound as the 10th greatest of all time. Kamran Rehmat By the end of that year, Wertmüller had made her e-mail: [email protected] directorial debut with I basilischi (The Lizards) — about Telephone: 44466405 — Lina three aimless youths in a sleepy southern Italian town Fax: 44350474 — and embarked on her own lifelong pursuit of faces, Wertmüller bodies and dialects that could not easily be sourced from ‘ ’ Cinecittà (Italy’s central studios). Friday, March 8, 2019 GULF TIMES 3 COVER STORY COMMUNITY Now aged 90, Wertmüller is puppet troupe. “Really, there are about to arrive in London, on screen two strands — two souls — which if not in person, as the fi rst star of coexist in my work: the lighthearted a new strand at London’s Barbican one associated with musical celebrating neglected fi lm-makers. comedies and the more socially Four of her fi lms will be featured in conscious one,” she says. the month-long season, alongside Her most recent, and probably a perky documentary about her her last, job was as co-director of life directed by her protege and Verdi’s opera Macbeth, at Salerno assistant Valerio Ruiz. It is Ruiz in 2016. But her rackety “vulgar” who greets me at her apartment, side is captured in the documentary perched two storeys up a winding when she performs one of her own staircase around the corner from songs, Bac Baccanale, written for the Piazza del Populo in central an abortive musical about Caligula. Rome. “Hands, sighs, bellies … girls all in The door opens on two lifesized a frenzy …” she growls, lit up with a cloth dummies which sprawl ribald energy. across a bench in the entrance The fi nal fi lm of the Barbican hall. Wertmüller is reclined on a season, 1974’s Swept Away, chaise longue, a diminutive fi gure condenses the elemental struggles in her trademark white-framed of class, sex and geographical origin glasses, with glossy scarlet toenails into a fable of a rich woman and a peeping out from a loose black poor sailor marooned on a desert robe. She shifts enough to allow island. It is Wertmüller’s Lord of the me a perch on the end next to her Flies , with the exquisite Mariangela feet, but is clearly not going to be Melato gradually succumbing to separated from the two props that Giannini’s re-emerging south- will dominate the next hour: an Italian machismo. “They are not ashtray, into which she taps the ash only a man and a woman but they from a steady stream of cigarettes, represent two politics: communist and an antique telephone, which and capitalist. I was interested in she answers at length, each of the observing what their relationship several times it rings. could be with no laws,” Wertmüller Her attention is focused beadily says. outwards: “And where did you grow Swept Away was picked up by up?” she parries, in answer to a Guy Ritchie and Madonna for a question about her early life. “How poorly received remake in 2002. tall are you?” she demands later, In the aftermath of her Oscars creating the alarming impression success, Wertmüller was signed that I might be being sized up as up by Warner Brothers for four an extra for her next fi lm. When I English language fi lms, but the deal tell her I have spent the last week only survived one fl op. The fi lm immersed in her work, which I critic Derek Malcolm recalls “a very found impressive but also deeply curious case In the early and mid- shocking, she takes a deep drag on 70s, she was the toast of Rome, her cigarette and gives the fi rst of ON CUE: Lina Wertmüller, right, on the set of Seven Beauties in 1975 with her star Giancarlo Giannini. London and New York, but quite many exaggerated shrugs. suddenly, in the late 70s, the bubble The four fi lms that will be shown the mafi a in the naive belief that he has been conscripted after a unsisterly camerawork, the director seemed to burst. After getting that in the retrospective were released the ballot would be secret. In 1973’s series of mishaps prompted by the gives another of her histrionic rare Academy nomination, she in an intense bout of creativity in lingerie-tastic Love and Anarchy, accidental shooting of his sister’s shrugs, and says: “I am looking for a could do nothing right.” the early 1970s, culminating in an accidental anarchist hides out wealthy sugar-daddy. reality that deforms the body.” “Italy is not one but many Seven Beauties, which won four in a brothel and falls in love with All three feature cameos from So who is Lina Wertmüller and countries,” she says. One possible Oscar nominations in 1977, making a prostitute, while waiting to one of Wertmüller’s most striking what drives her “deforming” explanation for her seesawing Wertmüller the fi rst woman to assassinate Mussolini. In the grimly outsider actors, Elena Fiore, who vision? Archangela Felice Assunta fortunes is that her work was so receive a best director nomination comedic Seven Beauties, a young made her debut in The Seduction Wertmüller von Eigg Spañol von intricately bound up with those (it wasn’t until 1994 that Jane Neapolitan hoodlum (nicknamed of Mimi as a middle-aged Sicilian Braueich — to give her full birth countries, as refl ected in the Campion joined her, for The Piano). “Settebellezze” — seven beauties — housewife, who succumbs to his name — was born into a wealthy faces and speech rhythms of their Her Oscar nominations (she also because of his disfi guring freckles) cynical advances. When I suggest family with a lineage that stretched inhabitants, that it got lost in received a nod for best screenplay) ends up in a concentration camp that it must have been pretty back to Switzerland, via a couple of translation. Her portrayal of women opened the door to a brief aff air after deserting the army to which brave for an actor to agree to such generations in the southern Italian also fell foul of feminist critics. with American cinema. In the region of Basilicata. “Wertmüller’s detachment from her documentary, Behind the White Those bare facts, she suggests, own femaleness and her old-style Glasses, her lead actor, Giancarlo Wertmüller’s explain two things: fi rst, her sense of herself as superwoman Giannini, recalls strolling together attachment to the south of Italy, allows her to treat women with through New York’s Times Square detachment even though she has spent much of more exaggerated scorn, even beneath billboards for four of their from her own her life in Rome. And, second and loathing, than men would dare to,” fi lms. more playfully, her predilection wrote Barbara Quart in 1988 — an With their polemical ardour, femaleness and for long titles (the Italian title of accusation that 30 years on, earns their gross-out caricatures — Love and Anarchy is Film d’amore e another shrug from the director: usually of women — and their her old-style d’anarchia, ovvero: stamattina alle “Critics will say what critics say.