Laughter and the Popular in Lina Wertmüller’s The Seduction of Mimì

When her first feature film, The Lizards/I basilischi (1963), was released in Italy, critics almost unanimously welcomed Lina Wertmüller as one of the enfants terribles of 1960s Italian cinema. That same year, Wertmüller had worked as assistant director for Federico Fellini on 8½ (1963). In acknowledging the debt that her first film paid to neorealism and to Fellini himself, critics were celebrating the rise of a young director whose work seemed to be entirely within the great Italian tradition of auteur cinema (Brunetta, 1993: 291; Micciché, 1975: 156). After The Lizards, Wertmüller did some work for the Italian state television company RAI. She directed the first edition of the show Canzonissima and then went on to make the first musicarello (music-comedy) ever broadcast on Italian TV, Il giornalino di Gianburrasca (1964–65). In the 1970s, Wertmüller returned to the attention of film critics and achieved her first major international success on the big screen, The Seduction of Mimì/Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (1972). This was a very different film from The Lizards. It was full of gags, crass humour and had a virtuoso visual style that was far from the restrained realist aesthetic of her first film. Wertmüller went on to make some of the most commercially successful Italian films of the 1970s. On the year of its release, The Seduction of Mimì took 820,725,000 lire in Italy and had the seventh highest box-office receipts, while Swept away/Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto had the fifth highest in 1975 (Colombo, 2001: 81). In the same period, Wertmüller’s films became a sensation in the United States where she was nominated for an Oscar for best director.