A Night Full Of Rain (1978)

Lizzy (Candice Bergen), a liberated American photographer, falls for narrow-minded journalist Paolo (Giancarlo Giannini). Then finds she can't live with him or without him. Bergen (Murphy Brown) and Giannini (Seven Beauties) take both comic and fierce battle stations in this colorful excursion into the male/female combat zone. So what if the world, as we learn from the TV in Lizzy and Paolo's luxurious apartment, is crashing around their ears; this is WAR!Writer/director Lina Wertmuller relied on spontaneity and improvisation in making …A Night Full of Rain, her first film in English.

Lina Wertmuller's first film foray in English is a deliriously feverish exploration into the lives of two lovers from the moment they meet and a thoroughly captivating examination of how different polarities attract and repel at the same time. The entire film centers around the principal characters Paulo, a lazy communist and left-wing journalist, and Lizzy, a pro-feminist photographer from the U.S., whose chance meeting at a religious festival in Italy is born of chaotic coincidence and sets the stage for the film's tumultuous tale.

Their personalities are oil and water personified, and therefore must be constantly shaken to stay mixed properly, and Wertmuller's direction never ceases to stir this cauldron via surrealistic scenes of their 'friends' speaking maliciously about them or observing them perversely through mirrors even though we know that, in fact, they aren't really there. They add an element of nightmarish delirium and it is through them that we gain additional insight into Lizzy and Paulo's characters and the various timeframes in their relationship that takes place over the span of ten years. The taut direction and sumptuous cinematography are mesmerizing and consuming, never letting you catch your breath between scenes. And Wertmuller's script must have been typed onto asbestos.

The chemistry between Candice Bergen and Giancarlo Giannini is further solidified by Wertmuller's camera and claustrophobic close-ups, bringing us inside the giddy intimacy, diametric tension and intermittant violent nature of their dynamic - they are like taffy being pulled, stretched and again congealed as a couple who have difficulty being together yet simply cannot be apart.