Indeed, she made her first film in , a date that represents the start of the decline in Italian production, following two decades of artistic supremacy. Yet, like Bardot in her time, Ornella Muti, with her juvenile eroticism, that insolent and placid grace, an indolence that might be taken for laziness, was soon to distinguish herself from the numerous soon to be forgotten starlets and naked young actresses featuring in throwaway popular films.
Granted, her breath-taking beauty might well have contributed to her rapid and growing popularity with international audiences. And nor was the interest some major directors, and particularly Marco Ferreri, took in her, pure coincidence. These stunning beginnings took a few years to turn into a real career. Her obvious beauty, but also her performance and her physical presence cannot have failed to appeal to Ferreri, a filmmaker far too long accused of misogyny but who sees himself as more of a cynical moralist.
Numerous actresses including Annie Girardot, Marina Vlady owe their best roles to him, but one has the impression that working with Ornella Muti was as decisive for the filmmaker as it was for the actress. Ferreri was just waiting for Muti, with her perverse innocence, domestic animality, that enigmatic presence. Averse to fashions in thought, hostile to intellectuals, Ferreri has, however, never stopped making political films.
A utopian story less negative than usual about love and maternity, The Future is Woman sets out the basis for a new society emancipated from social and family regulations, in which real ties would no longer be those of blood, but those of the heart. A couple of Bohemian intellectuals adopt an abandoned young woman who is expecting a child. For the first time, one has the feeling that Ornella Muti is creating a performance, creating a character far removed from her own.
The role of Cass undoubtedly remains her finest work as an actress, in which she abandons the vital energy, the untroubling sensuality that characterises her, to inhabit the character of a woman who is sick, morbid and disturbing. A year earlier, Ornella Muti had had an altogether different kind of role, as the intergalactic and nymphomaniac princess in Flash Gordon , a sci-fi extravaganza produced by Dino De Laurentiis and directed by Mike Hodges in which the actress sashays around in the most unlikely costumes and settings that constitute a treasury of shiny vulgarity, and deploys an uninhibited sensuality,while making fun of this image of sexual fantasy with that indifference which is hers alone, and that excludes any knowing looks at the viewer.
