Directed by: Lina Wertmüller
Stars: Mariangela Melato, Michele Placido, Roberto Herlitzka
Language: Italian | Subtitles: English
Country: Italy | Imdb Info
Also known as: Notte d’estate con profilo greco, occhi a mandorla e odore di basilico
Description: Fulvia Bolk is a fabulously wealthy, self-made Lombard businesswoman who has grown tired of seeing Italy’s richest families terrorized by professional kidnappers. Bold, arrogant, and convinced that money can solve almost anything, she devises a private act of revenge: kidnap one of the kidnappers and force his organization to repay the fortunes it has collected in ransom.
Her chosen target is Giuseppe “Beppe” Catanìa, a rough Sicilian-Sardinian bandit believed to be deeply involved in the country’s abduction business. Fulvia hires Turi Cantalamessa, an eccentric former intelligence agent, to capture Beppe and transport him to her secluded island estate.
Bound, blindfolded, and held inside Fulvia’s luxurious fortress, Beppe is ordered to arrange his own ransom. Fulvia initially communicates with him from a distance, hiding behind cameras, altered voices, and carefully planned security. She expects fear and submission. Instead, Beppe answers her with mockery, masculine pride, and complete refusal to be intimidated.
Their confrontation soon becomes more personal than financial.
Fulvia is fascinated by her prisoner’s defiance, while Beppe begins identifying his mysterious captor through her voice, temperament, and unmistakable scent of basil. Interrogation turns into flirtation; captivity becomes a theatrical game of domination in which neither participant is willing to admit how much the other excites them.
Turi watches Fulvia abandon the discipline of his carefully designed operation. She changes orders, interferes with security, and moves dangerously close to revealing herself. What began as an ideological mission on behalf of Italy’s wealthy elite becomes an intimate struggle between two predators who recognize the same hunger for power in one another.
When the ransom is finally recovered and Beppe is released, Fulvia celebrates what appears to be a complete victory. But Beppe has understood the game better than she realizes. Returning with his own armed force, he reverses the kidnapping and demands an even larger payment, transforming captor into captive without ending the attraction between them.
Summer Night with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil is Lina Wertmüller’s sardonic combination of kidnapping farce, political satire, erotic comedy, and battle-of-the-sexes melodrama. Its absurdly long title suits a film in which every argument, scheme, seduction, and ideological speech grows more extravagant than the last.
Legacy Note:
The film inevitably recalls Wertmüller’s earlier Swept Away, particularly through the reunion of the director with Mariangela Melato and the use of an isolated Mediterranean setting for a struggle between an aggressive woman and a defiant man. But Fulvia and Beppe are not simply new versions of the bourgeois woman and working-class sailor from that film.
Here, both characters are predators.
Fulvia profits from fashionable environmental enterprise and presents herself as the defender of the ruling class. Beppe profits from kidnapping the same wealthy people she claims to protect. They speak from opposing sides of society, yet both understand money, intimidation, performance, and self-preservation. Their attraction grows not because one defeats the other, but because each recognizes an equal opponent.
Mariangela Melato gives Fulvia a magnificent mixture of vanity, intelligence, vulgarity, and commanding style. Dressed in extravagant Valentino costumes, she turns every order into theatre and every political argument into a personal declaration of war. Michele Placido answers her with a physical, amused performance that keeps Beppe dangerous even while he remains chained and blindfolded.
Roberto Herlitzka’s Turi provides the comic machinery behind the plot: a retired spy whose elaborate operation is repeatedly sabotaged by the woman paying for it. His growing jealousy adds another layer to the power game, while John Steiner appears as Fulvia’s polished but increasingly inadequate lover.
The attractive Sardinian photography and elegant island locations give the film the surface of a glamorous summer romance, but Wertmüller fills that beauty with class resentment, environmental opportunism, sexual rivalry, and arguments about who has the right to steal from whom.
Uneven, talkative, flamboyant, and unmistakably Wertmüller, Summer Night with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil is a late continuation of her great cinematic diatribes: two sharks chained together by money and desire, each waiting for the perfect moment to reverse the trap.
Trailer:
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