Resonant, controversial, untitled

If you were to read the little box on Italian director/screenwriter Lina Wertmüller in Hindustan Times’s supplement on IFFI 2005, you might think Wertmuller wasn’t very imaginative when it came to titling her movies. One para in the box reads:

In 1970, she directed a string of pictures that are still resonant and controversial, despite occasional heavy-handedness. '' (1972) was a witty look at the link between sex and politics. Her follow-up '' was the hit foreign film of 1973. She had another success with '' (1974). In 1975 she directed the enormously popular '' and in 1976 hemmed her masterpiece ''. The other titles are: '' (1979), '' (1983), '' and '' (both 1985), '' and '' (both 1986), '' (1989), '' (1990) and '' (1993).

Whew, that's some filmography!

Won’t joke about this too much though because, having been on a late-night copy-desk myself, I know how these things work. The correspondent in Goa probably sent the copy to the Delhi office in this state, asking the desk to do a quick search on the Internet Movie DataBase and fill in the movie names. Someone failed to read the email properly. Someone fell asleep. Someone put the page in the “Released” basket. And today, someone is laughing.

Or maybe it has to do with the fact that the real titles of some of those films include:

Scherzo del destino in agguato dietro l'angolo come un brigante da strada (English: A Joke of Destiny, Lying in Wait Around the Corner Like a Bandit)

and

Fine del mondo nel nostro solito letto in una notte piena di pioggia, La (English: The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain)