She’s a representative of the Italian fashion industry. The child of screen legends Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, she’s been in touch with the glamorous life since birth. So what is Isabella Rossellini doing feigning sex with bugs while dressed up as one?
Being hilarious, for starters.
Rossellini is the brains behind a new series of Sundance Channel film shorts called Green Porno. The project stemmed from a request made by the network for her to produce something with an “environmental” theme. She chose the freaky ways bugs get freaky. “My love for animals is the one thing that has led me to discover about the difficulties that they have in the wild,” Rossellini explains. “And the love for the animal is not only cuddly pets, but it’s also the interest in the incredible, funny ways that these creatures conduct their lives. That’s when I thought of the sex life of bugs, because it [would be] very unusual and quite scandalous, if they were human.”
It’s a fascination that goes back a long way — in fact, starting with her mother, in a sense. “The first time I came to this house in the country 20 years ago, there was a rose called the Ingrid Bergman rose,” she begins. “I bought the house and I planted the Ingrid Bergman rose. And that rose started to wilt and didn’t look good. So I looked close to see why not, and I saw there were little insects all over it.” It was in researching how to deal with these aphids that Rossellini first found herself absorbed by the bizarre reproductive mysteries of the insect kingdom. “The aphids, they reproduce by — they just clone themselves,” she says, still sounding somewhat amazed.
From there, curiosity took over. Rossellini found herself in the library researching any and all species she might stumble upon in her garden. “That’s how it started. When I was reading these very boring scientific books … to make it simple in my head, I said, ‘OK. So if I were the fly, I would spit on my food. I wouldn’t spit saliva — I would spit something else. And then the food would liquefy, the same way it liquefies now, that I’m a human, in my stomach. And I can suck it — so I wouldn’t need the teeth, I would imagine myself like the fly. … But I think everybody does that.”
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In each film, Rossellini follows her curiosity through to a most interesting end. Dressed as a fly, a bee, praying mantis or other tiny creature, she enacts and narrates the reproductive rituals of the species, somehow maintaining a straight face all the while. And although the films certainly could have been offensive, they’re actually rather cartoon-like, due mainly to the grade-school-pageant production values and deliberate broad use of simple, often primary colors.
The decision to keep things simple probably worked to her advantage in terms of the budget she was given for the project, but Rossellini had more shrewdly aesthetic reasons, as well. She knew that people would be watching these films on cellphones or computers as well as on television, so she designed them with an animated look in mind. “If you look at Chuck Jones or Disney on a big screen, on a television screen or in a small screen, it pretty much stays the same,” Rossellini explains. “So that’s how I decided that the art direction of my film is a very big paper cutout … everything is very crisp.”
Everything is also pretty funny. It would have to be, given the nature of Rossellini’s image as the sophisticated actor/model who has been profiled in another Sundance Channel series, Iconoclasts. Seeing her get busy with an enormous housefly while dressed as one couldn’t be further from the dignified image she’s projected in fashion ads from here to Milan. But that’s not part of her aim with Green Porno. “I’m not playing off my public image,” she insists. “It’s hard to even have an idea of what is the public image. … I really just pursue what is interesting to me.”
Although not everyone will remember, one of Rossellini’s initial interests when first stepping in front of the camera was comedy. When she was 19, she began working with a comedian who eventually would become one of Italy’s celebrated directors and an Academy Award winner, Roberto Begnini. “I worked with Roberto for three years,” she recalls. “So there was always a comic strip in me, but then, because I was a beauty” — she laughs heartily, putting quotes around the term — “and there’s more money in beauty — I just modeled.”
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But as funny as Green Porno is, there’s that side to it that’s undeniably fascinating at the real, scientific level. Rossellini, upon initially showing her films to a few people, was surprised to find that the facts she presents in them aren’t necessarily common knowledge. “I was very surprised, actually,” she says. “People said to me, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that,’ about insects, you know. That not only they’d laugh about my film, but that they got information they didn’t know. That pleased me.”
In addition to working with Green Porno, Rossellini continues to be very busy with numerous other projects, including planning a film for which she’s written the script based on her experiences training dogs. “I raise dogs for the blind,” she offers. “All these questions about nature and animals, and domestication, how a wild animal like the wolf can be domesticated to become a kind animal, like a guide dog — all this is something that I’ve read a lot, obviously, because I have my dogs, and it’s an interest of mine. So I did write a script about dogs that I would like to do.”
And, as always, she remains a fixture in the glamour world — in particular, as the spokesperson for Italian fashion’s Made in Italy ad campaign. “People don’t, sometimes, know that if you wear Manolo Blahnik shoes, they’re done in Italy,” she explains. “Or Donna Karan coats. Chances are that the cashmere comes from — the animal might have grown in Chile or Argentina, but the weaving has been done in Italy.” Although she’s speaking obviously speaking on behalf of the campaign, she does so as obviously with significant national pride. “Italy has this long tradition of style,” she continues. “We don’t have any oil. We don’t have diamonds. We don’t have any gold. We have design — and we’ve had that for centuries. That’s what we do, whether it’s food that’s internationally known for how delicious it is, or fashion or design in cars — Italy always takes things and makes them better.”
They say that you can’t improve upon nature. But In Rossellini’s case, with Green Porno, besting nature wasn’t really the idea to begin with. Making it accessible and funny definitely was. It’s a mission that Rossellini aims to continue: She has already started writing another batch of Green Porno. “The next Green Porno that I would like to do is about marine animals,” she says. In it, she plans to feature “a little bit of the debate about the depletion of the ocean, so it has more of a message.”
Until then, she and Sundance Channel have to wait to determine the success of this first series. “Sundance’s mission is to experiment, so it might be that they say, ‘No, the next film, it has to be another experiment,'” Rossellini speculates about her series’ future. But she remains up for anything. “It’s up to them to decide, OK, is this worth a series — because they do have a television channel and they have the structure to make it into a series, or maybe remain in the realm of experiments, so they might say, ‘Do another one. Do another experiment.’ This is our mission.”
Green Porno has its Sundance Channel On Demand debut this month, and will premiere on Sundance Channel in July or just watch them NOW!