In una notte di chiaro di luna

I can't believe I'm the first/only person to write about this movie. I guess it barely got distributed, despite the high-profile cast.

As is so often the case with Wertmuller, she takes on some provocative ideas but then has nothing coherent to say about it, making name actors play one-dimensional characters, hitting a tone that can neither be taken seriously as drama nor qualifies as satire. So here we have Rutger Hauer as a globe-trotting European journalist who goes around pretending to have AIDS just in order to trigger alarmist reactions-not even to educate or expose prejudice, but to simply generate sensationalist magazine fodder.

Then one day he discovers he actually is HIV positive--which makes little sense, since he is not gay, bi, an IV drug user, or otherwise in any high-risk group. His reaction makes even less sense, as he abandons girlfriend Nastassja Kinski and their newborn without saying why. But then this screenplay (by the director and the star) has a lot of logic gaps, suggesting not any deliberate stylistic decision but rather that the filmmakers just didn't think things through.

Yet somehow "On a Moonlit Night" (the title under which I finally saw it) got shot in several different countries in plush locations with a starry cast, at considerable assumed expense. It is not one of LW's more hysterically pitched films. Still, she seems to throw anything at the wall that might stick, including a plus-sized drag queen singing in Betty Boop's voice. And needless to say, its perspective on AIDS is bizarre, even irrelevant--so it's one of those movies that softens a "controversial" subject by somehow having that issue impact people who rarely would be impacted in real life, i.e. An "AIDS movie" in which the victims are all well-off heterosexuals.

I saw the film in an English-language print, and while most of these actors can indeed speak English, that doesn't make the dialogue sound any less awkward--it very much has the quality of speech written in one language that doesn't translate very naturally to another. There are lots of montages to music, and handsome far-flung locations. But after a while the gratuitous detours and unnecessarily plush production values just seem like ways to pad the film while it avoids having much of any actual plot.

Rutger Hauer can take care of himself, and maintains focus playing a character whose status as both cad and victim the film never quite reconciles, or even acknowledges. There's also a decent performance by Luigi Montefiori aka George Eastman, a familiar macho figure from Italian exploitation movies. As in Pupi Avati's "Christmas Present" and its sequel, he plays a gay man (well, here a bisexual) without any condescension or caricature at all. Peter O'Toole is in unusually sober, dignified form in his glorified cameo, though I wasn't quite clear on just who or what his character was supposed to be.

But Nastassja Kinski, a performer who needs solid directorial guidance, flails in an underdeveloped female lead role where she basically does nothing but pine and whine for the hero. Lorraine Bracco and Dominique Sanda don't fare much better in briefer, poorly written parts, while Faye Dunaway chews scenery in a late-arriving role that is all glam soap-opera contrivance--her scenes with Hauer nudge the film into Harold Robbins territory. Massimo Wertmuller (presumbly the director's son) is nondescript in a support role.

As glossy and even overproduced as it is, the film goes on quite long enough to wear out its welcome, since we realize there's never going to be any real point or conviction to the story. Wertmuller could be a decent director when given a strong script, but I think she fancied herself an auteur like Italian peers Fellini, Antonioni or Pasolini, one whose imagination and instincts were so singular she could just sort of free-associate her ideas into script form. But her ideas were seldom strong enough to get away with that kind of self-indulgence, and her direction too often simply underlined the contradictory flimsiness of her thinking. This is a good example of that: A movie that has everything money can buy, but no guiding intelligence to apply to its hot-button topic. Ultimately her take on AIDS evinces so little basic understanding of that health crisis' reality, the movie could just as well have been hung on any other trending news item of the era, from herpes to crack.

For me the weirdest thing about "Moonlit Night" was realizing that the unmemorable theme song is for some unknown reason sung by Guy Kyser, of the American indie rock band Thin White Rope. A band I loved, but one that was pretty under-radar even during their lifespan. So how he got involved in this glossy, flop Europudding obscurity is a real puzzle.