Ornella Muti - The Sensual Gaze

Опубликовано: 12 Ноябрь 2024
на канале: Dreams of the Projected Night

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In 1981, on a Friday late night show (about 11.15) at the Screen on the Hill in Belsize Park, I went to see a little heralded film called 'Tales of Ordinary Madness'. It was a film based on the short stories and other writings of Charles Bukowski with Ben Gazzara in the main role of the hard-drinking womanising poet. I wasn't, at the time, terribly interested in poetry or poets. But something in the brilliant raw honesty of Bukowski's language struck a chord as it must have done with millions of others over the years and as it must have done with Marco Ferreri, who directed the film. Bukowski was not a fan of the film. He felt that Gazzara looked too pleased with himself. It's true. He did. But that was one of the things that made it work. The other was the tragic story of Cass that was at the heart of the film. 'The Most Beautiful Woman in Town'. I had rarely seen someone so captivating and, spoiler alert, someone whose absence registered more powerfully. This was life at its most beautiful and most ugly.

I became a great admirer of Bukowski's work. It made me want to write. Whether it should have done or not is another matter. But he nailed the world that surrounded him better than any writer I had read up to that point. I also wanted to see more of Ornella Muti. She was a popular actress in Italy. A famous actress. It took me a while to realise that she had been in Mike Hodges' immensely popular and joyfully camp 'Flash Gordon' a year earlier and that I had seen her in it and been beguiled by her there too. She stole Volker Schlöndorff's Proust adaptation, 'Swann in Love', a film that made me read Proust. Yes, I am one of those lightweights most inspired to read great works of literature because I saw the movie. In that film she did something amazing, she seemed like someone once again. The slightly uninteresting wife of the title character who, nevertheless, exerts an erotic obsession in his heart (and in a number of us watching).

Some of the films she starred in were... very Italian. She was excellent in James Toback's 'Love and Money', a film I saw on television late one night and have not been able to track down since, and in Francesco Rosi's 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold' which made me read Gabriel García Márquez' short novel. I tried to draw her face because it fascinated me so much. Something in her eyes held me. She still acts in films but, even in this internet age, it is not easy to see them. My Italian is rubbish anyway, unless they were subtitled or dubbed, I'd have no idea what was going on. The latest of her films I saw was 2012's Woody Allen film 'To Rome With Love'

Contents

0:00 - The Future is Woman
0:10 - Apassionata Flash Gordon and The Nun and the Devil
0:20 - Apassionata Flash Gordeon and Nest of Vipers
0:36 - Swann in Love
0:46 - Tales of Ordinary Madness and Nest of Vipers
1:02 - Swann in Love and Tales of Ordinary Madness
1:25 - Swann in Love
1:42 - Tales of Ordinary Madness
2:17 - Nest of Vipers
2:38 - Tales of Ordinary Madness
3:17 - Flash Gordon
3:31 - Nest of Vipers
3:56 - Tales of Ordinary Madness
4:14 - Collage of Tales of Ordinary Madness and Nest of Vipers
5:19 - The Future is Woman and Titles
5:43 - Tales of Ordinary Madness

Music: 'Floating Home' and 'Nineties Pad' by Brian Bolger
Helium by Track Tribe

#ornellamuti #italiancinema #eroticfilms #artcinema #marcoferreri #flashgordon #thesensualgaze