Wertmuller Explores AIDS Love Story

The scene is being shot in a splendid, eccentric, high-rise office filled with antique hobby horses, Tiffany lamps and bowls of roses, with expansive windows looking down on Times Square. Faye Dunaway and Nastassja Kinski confront each other over the affections of Rutger Hauer with a passion worthy of many intense romantic triangles committed to film. But this one will break new ground for the big screen: Both women are quite aware that Hauer’s character is infected with the AIDS virus--and both women want him.

The film, which began shooting here Jan. 30, is called “Crystal or Ash, Fire or Wind, as Long as It’s Love.” The director is Lina Wertmuller, the petite, bespectacled Italiana whose work includes the provocative, irony-drenched 1970s sociopolitical comedies “Love and Anarchy,” “The Seduction of Mimi,” “Swept Away” and “Seven Beauties.”

Due partly to the element of AIDS in the story line, “As Long as It’s Love” is perhaps a more “serious” Wertmuller film, lacking her trademark irony, which often blurs the line between comedy and drama. But the subject, she declared during a break in shooting, is nonetheless “love, which is the subject of all my movies.”

The director, who has been known to waffle vaporously in interviews, also said that the film deals with “the kind of collective psychosis that can be created today by the terrorizing machine of the mass media.” More specifically, it touches upon “the biggest of the contemporary psychoses”: the one surrounding AIDS.

Rutger Hauer is more direct: “It’s a love story, between my character and Nastassja Kinski’s, but a love story needs crisis and conflict, and those are provided here by the fact that my character is an AIDS carrier.” That is, his character has tested positive for the acquired immune deficiency syndrome virus but has not come down with the disease.

The movie’s focus on AIDS was sufficiently off-putting to one major American studio that the producer, Fulvio Lucisano, approached for backing. “They wrote me a letter,” he reported, “saying that it was a beautifully written script, but that they were afraid of it because of AIDS.”

Lucisano eventually secured financing for the project from Italian and French distributor advances. He said it will cost a moderate $6 million to $7 million despite an expensive cast that also includes Peter O’Toole and a schedule that will take it to Paris, Rome, Venice and London between now and early April.

(Meanwhile, AIDS, a viable TV-film subject since “An Early Frost,” three years ago, has yet to be contracted by the protagonist of a Hollywood-financed feature, though just last week producer David Picker announced that the long-delayed “The Normal Heart”--based on Larry Kramer’s angry stage play about the early history of AIDS--is reportedly being prepared for summer filming. In France, the protagonist of Paul Velliacchi’s fall 1988 release “Encore” eventually becomes ill with AIDS.)

Although Wertmuller describes “As Long as It’s Love” as her first “non-ironic” film, it has its ironies. Rutger Hauer’s hero is a Paris-based American magazine writer, or, as the director put it, “an operator within the world of mass media.” He learns of his own AIDS-infected condition after a period of pretending to be infected to gather material for an article on public attitudes about the disease--he takes a job as a dockhand in London, for example, and announces his condition to co-workers. “The reactions vary,” said the actor of characters’ responses to his condition, “but are all pretty much hysterical.”

After his character learns that he is “serio-positive,” Hauer went on, “the film becomes the story of what goes on in your mind when you know that you’re closer to the end of your life than you thought, though you don’t know how close. And how do you live what’s left of your life? I did speak to some people with AIDS who were actually quite close to the end. But mostly I’m relying on what Lina wants to say and on my own imagination.”

One of the first things Wertmuller has the character do is try to determine the source of his infection. In an early version of the script, Hauer reported, “there was a link to bisexuality. But Lina took that out because she felt it was almost too much on the money, too easy.” In the shooting script, the transmission is heterosexual.

Hauer’s character also gives up journalism, and out of a combination of fear, shame and denial leaves his colleague/lover Kinski and their young daughter, to return to New York. There, he persuades the head of a pharmaceutical company specializing in baby products (Dunaway) to diversify into condom manufacturing--and to funnel the profits from this operation into AIDS education and research. In the course of this, he begins an affair with Dunaway’s character, who is also infected with the deadly virus.

In addition to the magnet of Wertmuller, whom she called “a great film stylist,” Dunaway was also drawn to the project because of its AIDS aspect. The actress’s voice, ordinarily so richly expressive, became flat and sad as she related that “one old friend has died of AIDS and three or four others are now ill.”

Though Dunaway’s role is relatively brief, requiring only a week’s shooting, she said that “the work was equally intense as the work I’ve done for longer roles. I spoke to friends who are active in research and raising money for AIDS; I spoke to groups for women who have tested positive, which is a relatively new thing; I read Susan Sontag’s book, ‘AIDS and Its Metaphors.’ ”

Wertmuller, too, has read Sontag. “She says some beautiful things,” she said.

Sontag’s thesis is that the vocabulary (e.g., the word plague ) used by the media and, consequently, the public in discussing AIDS creates a hopelessness among persons with AIDS by suggesting that their condition is a kind of retribution for immoral behavior.

In fact, Wertmuller’s view--which may have influenced her to change the source of her protagonist’s infection--is similar.

“Somehow the mass media have made it into a biblical condemnation of freedom of choice and style of life. Even if I think that the constrictions, the rules around the game of love are very erotic. . . . I cannot accept or suggest that this disease is a damnation of God for those who are free lovers.”

The film takes pains to brand as absurd the idea advanced by European “hard” Greens, or extremist environmentalists, that AIDS is a form of natural population control.

Though this last is apparently a fairly recent notion, the film, which takes place between 1986 and 1989, views the AIDS crisis as becoming more optimistic over time. “The movie is on the sunny side of the street,” is how Wertmuller puts it.

Part of this has to do with Wertmuller’s belief in the redemptive power of love--Kinski’s for Hauer in this case. “It’s also a question of them both accepting their responsibilities toward each other,” Kinski said. “I think you feel that some sort of life, however long it will be, is possible for them.”

And some part of it comes from the director’s view of history and of humankind. “As ugly as our times may be,” Wertmuller commented, “they’re still the least ugly in the history of humanity. Because the so-called beautiful old times were a long tragedy of pain, sorrow and injustice. So man is becoming better--though the price for that is that he has at his disposal the means for his own self-destruction.

“But I am an optimist--even though I say sometimes I’m an optimist terrorized.”