Seven Beauties

Also receiving an Oscar at this year's Governor Awards was Lina Wertmuller, who is well known to Oscar triviots as the first woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. That was for the 1976 film year (she lost to John Avildsen for Rocky). What's disturbing is that there have only been four women in the ensuing 43 years, with only one, Kathryn Bigelow, winning.

She was nominated for Seven Beauties, a phantasmagorical look at an Italian deserter during World War II. Giancarlo Giannini, who appeared in many of Wertmuller's films, plays Pasqualino, a dandy and small-time hood. He has seven ugly sisters (hence the title), and when he finds one of them is being pimped out by her fiance, he decides to kill him. Thus begins his picaresque adventures, which includes stints in a mental institution and then, most grimly, in a Nazi concentration camp.

Wertmuller, though her name is Teutonic, is Italian, and her film echoes many of the Italian greats, namely Fellini. Though Seven Beauties is full of horrors, it has that insouciance that Italian films can be known for. It is full of the grotesque aspects of life, but also never quite leaves its comic nature, even in the most excruciating scenes. Perhaps most exemplifying of this is the scene in which Giannani attempts to seduce the matron of the camp, played menacingly by Shirley Stoler. She is porcine and sadistic, and lets him have sex with her, but in the most humiliating way imaginable.

Pasqualino is a survivor, and does anything he can to survive, even if it means doing things like that. He is faced with a choice late in the movie that I won't spoil here, but it tests the viewer, who can not help but imagine what he or she would do in the same circumstance.

Seven Beauties does not shy away from anything, whether it's a man diving into a vat of human waste or Giannini, working in the asylum, coming across a bound female patient and, well, it's not a thing that would probably be put in a movie today ("I haven't been with a woman in seven months," he says by way of excuse). But he always gets punished for his actions--we cut from him on top of this woman, who screams, to him being hosed down and then put in a straitjacket.

The film opens with scenes of the war, particularly of Mussolini and Hitler. Pasqualino is not political, and there is an exchange with a socialist as they are both sent off to prison. Giannini is asked what he is being sent up for, and he replies, "A hatchet murder." The Socialist replies that he is being imprisoned for thinking, and his sentence is twice as long. But even those who avoided politics during that time period couldn't escape it, as the Italians started off as Hitler's allies but then were the enemy. Stoler refers to him as a "subhuman Italian," but she also notes that the Nazi fantasy of being the master race is doomed to failure.

Seven Beauties, at times, can be a difficult to watch. Wertmuller was unstinting in presenting the brutality of life during the war, but also can't help but find the humor in these situations. Over the next few weeks I'll look at some of her other films, as this is the only one I have seen so far (I saw it back in college for the first time, and as usual, remembered none of it, so it was like seeing it for the first time).

Giannini was also nominated for an Oscar, as was Wertmuller for her script and the film for Best Foreign Language Film.