Dir: David Greene
Star: Vanessa Redgrave, Nastassja Kinski, Jennifer Tilly, Dennis Farina
I was curious about this TV mini-series, as it was based on a novel by Lynda La Plante, whose other televisual work we’ve been enjoying of late. She’s pretty much the doyenne of female crime drama, in particular for having created Prime Suspect, the series of films starring Helen Mirren, which ran intermittently for 15 years to much critical acclaim, and inspired innumerable other shows, from The Closer to The Killing, as well as a short-lived US remake. But more relevant to this, is perhaps Widows, her career breakthrough, which had three seasons on British TV in the first half of the eighties (and was also remade for the States). Its focus was a group of women, whose husbands were career criminals: when their men end up getting killed in the course of a botched robbery, they take up the mantle and continue with the plan.
There’s more than an echo of that here, with the series [originally screened in two feature-length episodes, now combined into a single DVD] based on a novel she wrote which was published in 1991, just when Prime Suspect was getting started. It tells the story of the Luciano crime family, part of the Mafiosi operating in Sicily under their patriarch, Don Roberto (Farina) and his wife, Graziana (Redgrave). He refused to allow another family, the Carollas, to traffic drugs through the port, and their boss, Pietro, angrily retaliates, kill Roberto’s son and heir, Michael, leaving his secret girlfriend, Sophia (Kinski), pregnant with his child. The resulting son is given up for adoption, but Sophia ends up marrying another of Roberto’s sons, and joins the family along with other “Mafia wives” Teresa (Illeana Douglas) and Moyra (Tilly).
The years go by, with Teresa having a daughter, Rosa, who grows into a young woman. However, the family has long memories, and are eventually able to have Pietro arrested, albeit not for the murder of Michael. Carolla’s men, and in particular his adopted son Luka, retaliate in savage fashion: the men are poisoned during a celebratory dinner before Rosa’s wedding, and Luka even sneaks into the family home, killing Sophia’s young twin sons. Bereft of all male help, the surviving widows appear easy pickings, as the other mob families look to strip the Lucianos of their remaining assets. Worse still, Luka (literally) bumps into them, and is soon embedding himself like… like an embeddy thing. And this is where the film finally becomes interesting, showcasing the strong female characters for which La Plante is famous, as they have to fight for what’s rightfully theirs [the film, wisely, ignores the fact that these are the proceed of organized crime] and against the snake in their bosom.
Got to love the cast, led by Redgrave – nominated for a Golden Globe as a result of this performance – but ably supported by Kinski, and in particular, Tilly, whose character claws her way up from casino croupier (and, according to her, poodle grooming!) to marry her way to respectability, despite Roberto throwing her out of a family wedding as a “whore” – fair comment, in some ways. But Kinski, with her “devil’s eyes”, cuts no less imposing a figure, particular at the end where it becomes clear that their quest for revenge is not a one-off incident, and Sophia won’t stop until every single person she holds responsible, has paid for their crimes. The male cast, led by Farina, is also pretty good, with support from Tony Lo Bianco, Peter Bogdanovich and Franco Nero, among others, but it’s once they step aside (or, more accurately, get bumped off) that proceedings take on an almost Shakespearean quality of vengeance.
The big flaw is the story, however, which relies on some quite incredible coincidence. If you didn’t work it out from the synopsis above, and I wouldn’t blame you for missing this nugget, Luka, the psychopathic adopted son of Pietro Carolla, is the grown-up version of the baby given up for adoption by Sophia. This first requires him to find his way to the same institution where Pietro’s real son has been hidden, because his crippled nature is an embarrassment to his father, where the two become best friends. Then, when the real son dies, Pietro is so guilt-stricken that, more or less on the spot, agrees to adopt Luka to make up for not having been a good father. Then, while escaping from one of his killings, Luka runs out in front of a car driven by the women, including his biological mother – who, rather than calling an ambulance, take him back to their house to recuperate, and become one of the family. Yeah, that’s an industrial-sized serving of disbelief you see me suspending.
How much you get out of this depends on whether you fell the undoubted quality of the performances, outweighs the equally incontrovertible shakiness of the plot. Both are more notable in the second half, with the first largely being a case of arranging the various pieces on the board, in preparation for what’s to come. On balance, I think the dramatic nature of the climax does deserve cutting the series some slack. There’s a horrific power to seeing Luka tied up by the women, and Sophia hovering menacingly over him, unaware it’s her own flesh and blood responsible for her situation, and that she’s contemplating killing as a result. It’s certainly a memorable moment, particularly by the low standards of the mini-series genre, and if getting there takes a significant amount of creative fortune, I’m more inclined to forgive this its trespasses, than the ladies involved are to let their bygones be bygones.
Illeana Douglas covers this production in her memoir:
https://archive.org/details/iblamedennishopp0000doug
Where do I begin? Wonderful David gets the credit always for some of my favorite things ever said to me or to anyone on a set. Hands down. Such as “You were late to set so lovely Jennifer is now going to say your lines.” Or, when, at the wrap party, after one of the lead actresses gave him a beautiful leatherbound script as a gift, he threw it onto the ground and said, “You were the worst one!” As she ran off in tears, he looked around as if to ask, What did I say?
https://imgur.com/APQY4SY
David had an obsession with not crying. There were all these gruesome murders and torturings and funerals, all things you would cry about, but he would become very upset whenever an actress was crying. We were shooting a scene in which one of the lead actresses loses her baby, and she was preparing for the highly emotional moment.
“Where is she?” David said impatiently.
“She’s preparing to cry,” said the first assistant director, very quietly trying to keep the mood.
“I don’t want her to cry!” David said.
The actress walked onto the set, and she was sobbing, ready to shoot this very sad scene. Through her tears she said, “Are we ready yet?”
And David said, “We have four minutes to shoot this before lunch; please stop crying!”
She ran off crying — for real. And . . . what’s for lunch?
https://imgur.com/juKj1oo
I have a wonderful Polaroid of David in my autograph book that I snapped when he wasn’t looking. I knew I would always want to remember exactly what he looked like. I look at that picture and start to laugh. It’s the back of beautiful Nastassja Kinski’s head, and David is inches from her ear, giving her direction. You can’t see Nastassja’s face, you have to imagine it, but I have a feeling her eyes may have been crossed.
If David was dismissive with other members of the cast, sometimes it seemed as if he was overdirecting Nastassja. One day David asked her if she was ready to act the scene. We had been called to rehearse, but David told Nastassja to go through the whole performance. Well somehow, Nastassja thought this meant the camera was rolling, so she proceeded to act out this highly emotional monologue. It was brilliant, but no one was filming it! The cameraman was trying to signal David to ask if he should start rolling, but David was just oblivious, waving him off for having interrupted Nastassja! He was completely engaged in “directing” her, and Nastassja obliged in giving one hell of a performance. We all just stood there watching, not knowing what to do. When she finished, David said to her, “That was beautiful, darling — the perfect amount of emotion. Would you like to put one on film now?”
Nastassja said, “I thought you were shooting?” She was, of course, wondering why he or anyone else hadn’t stopped her. We all felt terrible. Here we were again, up against lunch, and with little time to shoot the actual scene. We all stood helpless, wanting to help Nastassja but not wanting to interfere with David. She said, “Well, now I can’t do it with everyone looking at me,” which she meant figuratively — but David literally instructed us to turn away and not to look at Nastassja. David said, “No one is looking, Nastassja, you may begin!” I was looking at Jennifer like, What is happening? Why are we doing this? We were all turned around waiting for her to start, but now began the discussion of whether or not there was time. “And . . . that’s lunch,” said the first assistant director. I grabbed a Polaroid camera and secretly snapped David and Nastassja’s picture to put in my journal.
Nastassja Kinski
The first time I heard the name Nastassja Kinski was when my grandfather Melvyn Douglas recommended a movie to me he had just seen called Tess, directed by Roman Polanski. I followed Nastassja’s career ever since and was almost starstruck at the notion of meeting her. In Bella Mafia , Nastassja played Sophia, one of Vanessa’s daughters by marriage. I thought it might be funny to show Nastassja what a big fan I was, so I brought a movie magazine I owned from the 1980s that had her on the cover to show her on the set. It was from around the time she had been in Cat People and Paris, Texas, a movie I really love. When I asked her if she would autograph it, she looked at me innocently and said, “Are you making fun of me?” I felt terrible. It was not my intention at all. I loved her. But maybe it is inappropriate to ask your costars to sign your movie memorabilia. There were five ladies in Bella Mafia , and there was always an ongoing issue with dresses. Who could, would, or should be wearing what? And how lowcut could it be? Every time I wanted to wear something I would see on the rack I would hear, “Sorry, Nastassja is wearing that. No, sorry, Jennifer is wearing the red.”
And cleavage. This ones got the dress with the cleavage. You’re wearing a sack. When we shot the poster, there was a brawl over ( diamond earrings. All the actresses had picked out the same pair of diamond earrings that they each insisted they had to wear. And no one wanted to hold the gun. I wasn’t a fighter, so I ended up with no earrings and holding a large pistol in the poster. One day I came to work, and I passed Nastassja. She said hello, very quietly, and I noticed something strange. She was wearing my dress.
“Hi,” she whispered as she passed. I should mention that Nastassja barely speaks above a whisper. Sexy in real life but tough when you’re trying to act with her. I would be with her in a scene, a foot away, and I would look at Jennifer and say, “I can’t hear anything. Is she talking?” Jennifer would answer in her signature baby voice, “What did you say?” That’s why I’m leaning forward in every scene. I could never hear my costars! I headed to wardrobe, and I said, “Guys, I just passed Nastassja and she is wearing my dress.”
“I know,” they said. “She saw it hanging there and she wanted to wear it.”
I said, “But I’m wearing it in the scene.”
The wardrobe lady was so blase by that point. She sighed. “Yeah,” she said. “We tried to explain that to her, but she liked it.”
I said, “I wore the dress in another scene. So we are both going to be wearing the same dress in different scenes. So our characters share dresses?”
They all shrugged. By that point, fatigue had set in. In the end, the only person who even noticed the double dress was my friend the designer Cynthia Rowley, who had lent me the dress in the first place. She was thrilled, of course, to see Nastassja Kinski wearing her dress, and Nastassja, as always, looked beautiful. But it was my dress!
I was so sad when Nastassja wrote in my autograph book: “Even though we hardly spoke, I want you to know I wanted to. I just get shy.” There’s a little heart next to it. I was so happy to reconnect with Nastassja recently. She still looks stunning, and I’m pushing for a Bella Mafia reunion … or intervention.
https://imgur.com/AgkqQ2W
https://imgur.com/wzJkIAL