Lina Wertmuller's "The Basilisks" (restoredI) and She's Just Not Into Me.

 I saw one of Lina Wertmuller’s films a few decades ago when I was crushing on my teacher, an attractive, intelligent   California socialist. I didn’t know any better, just that the films were beautiful and idealistic. So was our teacher.   

 She presented a    world as we’d like it to be.  This included being a great fan of Che Guevara, without the political murders the regime orchestrated to rub out all traces of the former Cuba.   

I was crushing on this professor pretty bad. She liked me, I could tell, but it never went anywhere.  Or it never went where I thought it might go.  I was torn between  my professor and my gf  who around the same time announced she was gay.

 I was a schizo-homophobic.  While I couldn’t conceive of male homosexual relationships, gay relationships between women didn’t bother me not at all. In fact, it turned me on. The gf of my gf is my gf too.

 But I lost on both counts. People come and go. The more people you know the more likely the go.  Well, we’ll always have Palo Alto.

  I’m watching Lina Wertmuller’s first solo film (she had worked with Fellini on 8 1/2 and he had a big influence on her)  tonight, several decades after I’d first heard of her.  It’s called   “The Basilisks” (I’ve yet to discover why that title)  and it’s about tough times in post-war Sicily. 

Lots of unemployment.  Grinding poverty everywhere.  Mothers were having a difficult time finding suitable men to marry their many daughters.  A communist party vying with the social democrats for political power.  Nostalgic fascists yearning for the good ole days of Mussolini.

People were fatalistic, giving up hope except to survive.   The film was made with high consciousness regarding social class identity and the unsteady relationship between the north and south of Italy. 

One of my favorite scenes  is at the end.  I involves ‘Antonio’ who finally breaks out of the rut of his listless and deeply rooted existence and goes to Rome.  He comes back dressed differently, speaking differently, boasting to his old amicis of how wonderful it is — attractive women everywhere, jobs, culture, beauty — a paradise on earth!  He tells his buds he’s going back the very next day but while he continues to talk up Rome day in an day out he never goes back and falls into the old habits of idling the hours playing cards and cherchez la femme etc…

The film has been restored only recently and if you’re into that kind of thing you might want to take a look.  It’s on Amazon Prime, I should mention, but maybe elsewhere too. As I kid I heard much of the Sicilian and Neapolitan dialects from my parents and grandparents, but when I went to Rome two years ago, I felt embarrassed to engage for it wasn’t the language I was hearing there.

Well thanks to Basilisks and a few other films located in southern Italy (I just watched 16 episodes of “My Brilliant Friend” on HBO and it’s central locus is Naples) I’m now speaking a hodge-podge of dialect and proper Roman with pride and entirely without embarrassment.

And I don't care any more. . .