Two Weeks in the Midday Sun by Roger Ebert

Author:Roger Ebert [Ebert, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1987-03-16T05:00:00+00:00

GRETA SCACCHI was the most visible actress at the festival this year, appearing in two official selections, Diane Kurys’ A Man in Love, and the Taviani’s Good Morning, Babylon. I’d been intrigued with her ever since seeing Heat and Dust, the 1983 Merchant-Ivory film in which she played a young English bride who violated all the taboos of British India in the 1920s by carrying on an affair with the local Nawab. Scacchi is one of those beautiful actresses who overwhelm their beauty with their brains. Like Jane Fonda, she likes to talk back, and I have a feeling she chooses strong directors because they conduct better conversations.

At the 1985 festival, for example, she starred with Eric Roberts in The Coca-Cola Kid, a very odd film by Dusan Makavejev, in which she played the daughter of a maverick Australian soft drink bottler who had declared war on Coke. I do not know why she took that role, but I suspect it had something to do with a curiosity about Makavejev, a big bear from Yugoslavia who is the jolly center of attention at every festival he attends, and who attends every festival he can. I met Makavejev a long time ago, at the 1967 Chicago Film Festival, when he went on a midnight search to find the alley where John Dillinger was shot dead. I have since met Makavejev more times in more different places—Los Angeles, New York, the Napa Valley, London, Stockholm, Venice, Cannes, Toronto, Montreal, and Telluride—than any other single person in the movie business. He will go anywhere, and is broad-minded about his accommodations. One year he had Sweet Movie at Cannes, and was staying at the Carlton. The next year he had no movie and no job, and when I ran into him at the Petit Carlton Bar he said he was sleeping on the beach, because it was more spacious than the Carlton.

I HAD LUNCH with Scacchi and Makavejev at that 1985 festival, playing the fly on the wall while they tested each other. Their conversation was a sparring match that suggested they had fought great battles on the set of The Coca-Cola Kid, while still remaining friends. We were sitting on a balcony at the Martinez.

“At first, we were not at home in the story,” Makavejev said.

“In the end, when you realized I was not stupid, we were more at home,” Scacchi said.

“Intelligence is not the same as IQ. Especially in actresses. It comes from an organic understanding of the material.”

“We had some painful confrontations,” Scacchi said, holding a black olive between her fingers and nibbling all around the pit.

“You are absolutely not Italian,” said Makavejev. “You talk about confrontations. They hit each other when they make Italian movies. Fellini, when he makes a movie, he shouts and screams at the actors even during their scenes. That is why they have to dub everything afterwards.”

“I am more Italian than you are,” Scacchi said. “I am half Italian. You are Yugoslavian.”

“I am Mediterranean. It is the same thing.

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