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Seven Beauties

(Pasqualino Settebellezze)

Medusa Distribuzione, 1975, Italy | Color, 114 minutes, Comedy/Drama

An Italian man joins the army during World War II to avoid a murder conviction, only to end up in a concentration camp after deserting his unit.

Director: Lina Wertmüller

Producer: Arrigo Colombo

Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli

Screenplay: Lina Wertmüller

Starring: Giancarlo Giannini (“Pasqualino”), Fernando Rey (“Pedro”), Shirley Stoler (“Prison Camp Commandant”), Piero Di Iorio (“Francesco”)

“What I hope to express in my films is my great faith in the possibility of man becoming human.”

—Lina Wertmüller

When Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties was released in 1975, it caused quite a bit of controversy. This was nothing new for Wertmüller, who was already one of the most talked-about filmmakers in Italy thanks to her scathing and provocative critiques of life there. But Seven Beauties asked the audience to do two unthinkable things: to follow the story of a man who murders, rapes, and is cowardly; and to laugh while being shown the horrors of World War II.

Right from the opening credits, we know we’re in for an unconventional war film. Seven Beauties starts with a series of newsreel images from the war, set rather incongruously to the song “Oh Yeah” by Enzo Jannacci. The lyrics include: “The ones who vote for the right because they’re fed up with strikes. Oh yeah. The ones who vote white in order not to get dirty. The ones who never get involved with politics. Oh yeah.”

This sets the tone for what we are about to see—a study of the contradictions of the people involved in World War II and how those who stood by and did nothing are as guilty as those who committed the atrocities.

And the central character of Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) is certainly guilty. We are introduced to him at the very moment he deserts Mussolini’s army, running through a dark, rainy forest in Germany. He boasts to fellow Italian soldier Francesco (Piero Di Iorio) that he stole bandages from a dead man in order to fake an injury and escape. When they later come across Nazi soldiers slaughtering a group of innocent Jews, Pasqualino refuses to intervene, fearing he might lose his own life in the process.

But he is not without his charms—or so he thinks. As the movie flashes back to the bright colors of pre-war Naples, we learn that Pasqualino ran a mattress company and considered himself quite a hit with the ladies. He gropes his female employees and flirts with women on the street, but is guilty of double standards when it comes to his many sisters. When he discovers that one of his sisters has started prostituting herself, he declares he will kill the pimp who has destroyed his family’s honor. This turns out to be nothing but talk; when Pasqualino faces the pimp, Totonno, he is knocked out in one punch. Humiliated, Pasqualino sneaks into Totonno’s bedroom and shoots the other man dead before he can defend himself. Things only get worse from there—Pasqualino then attempts to dispose of the body by cutting it up into pieces.

This, it turns out, is the crime which ultimately leads to his involvement in World War II. As the film jumps back and forth in time, we see Pasqualino sent to an insane asylum. Here, in a particularly brutal scene, he rapes a female patient who is strapped to a bed. As a way out of the asylum, he agrees to join Mussolini’s army, where after deserting his squad, he is captured by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp.

Lina Wertmüller portrays the camp in realistic and horrific detail. She uses close-ups of mass executions of Jewish people to make it impossible to escape the brutality. Running the camp is a woman (Shirley Stoler) who seems devoid of humanity. She tortures innocent men and orders them to their death. Remembering some advice from his mother about appealing to women with love, Pasqualino decides that his only way out is to seduce her. In the most controversial scenes of the film, Pasqualino offers sexual favors to the Nazi woman, leading to another morally difficult situation.

In most movies, these types of moral conundrums would see the character search within himself and decide to change. This is not one of those movies. As film critic Roger Ebert observed, “Seven Beauties isn’t the account of a man’s fall from dignity, because Pasqualino never had any—and that’s what makes it intriguing.” At every turn, Pasqualino chooses to save his own life over anyone else’s, and somehow, he keeps surviving.

Despite the material (or perhaps in defiance of it), Seven Beauties is a comedy—a very, very dark comedy. The tone switches throughout, from more broadly comedic to ironic and finally caustic. What keeps us watching is the charisma of Giancarlo Giannini. He is a handsome actor with a devilish smile who plays Pasqualino with glee, throwing himself unapologetically into this revolting character. He is so compelling that despite ourselves, we almost want Pasqualino to come out on top.

Featuring such a horrific character who inspires sympathy from the audience formed one part of the controversy surrounding Seven Beauties. The other was its comedic approach to World War II.

And yet, Seven Beauties went on to become one of Lina Wertmüller’s most successful films and one of the few foreign films to be nominated for four Academy Awards. One of those nominations was for Giancarlo Giannini’s performance. Another was for Wertmüller’s direction, making her the very first female filmmaker ever to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. In 2018, following the announcement of Greta Gerwig as the fifth woman up for the award, Lina Wertmüller reflected on how news reports in 1976 termed her nomination “historic.” Though she was embarrassed at the time, “in hindsight, it was [historic],” she says, “especially for women all over the world. To this day I get thank-you letters from directors who say they have been inspired by my experience.”

Lina Wertmüller was born in Rome in 1928, a time when the country was ruled by fascist leader Benito Mussolini. She loved cinema from the start; she expressed her rebellious streak by sneaking out of class to watch movies and was expelled from fifteen different schools. “I was fascinated by stories on the big screen,” Wertmüller later explained, “and I wanted to be involved in that kind of entertainment… Then, when I was a teenager, I met the actress Flora Carabella. She was a little older than me, but we became best friends, and she introduced me to the magic of theater. I was very young, but I immediately knew that I wanted to study at the Theatre Academy. That’s how I started to be part of that world.”

She graduated from the Academy in Rome in 1951, much to the chagrin of her father, who wanted her to be a lawyer. He was a controlling presence throughout her life and often fought with his daughter. But Lina Wertmüller was determined to succeed; she spent a decade working in experimental theater and puppeteering, where she used puppets to tell the stories of Franz Kafka. Then in 1961, Wertmüller got her big break when she met acclaimed director Federico Fellini and was hired as assistant director for 8½. Working on this groundbreaking piece of Italian cinema gave her the inspiration, confidence, and financial backing to direct her first film, The Lizards (I Basilischi), in 1963, about three men who spend their days chasing women. Both that debut and her second film, Let’s Talk about Men, a look at misogyny released in 1965, were well regarded, yet Wertmüller still struggled to secure enough financing to keep directing.

She turned to television for work, but made her cinematic comeback with 1972’s The Seduction of Mimi, a political satire which won her the Best Director award at Cannes. Wertmüller found even more success with her next three films. Love and Anarchy (1973) starred Giancarlo Giannini and earned her the attention of international critics. Swept Away in 1974 followed a rich society woman who becomes stranded with a crew member while on a cruise. This film earned much critical praise but also a great deal of backlash about the abusive treatment of the central female character, with Anthony Kaufman from The Village Voice writing that it was “possibly the most outrageously misogynist film ever made by a woman.” The following year, Seven Beauties was released and earned both rave reviews and critical rants, particularly about the films’ sensitivity toward its Holocaust subject matter.

After Seven Beauties, Lina Wertmüller struggled to make any more critical hits. Her first American film, The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain, failed at the box office. But she continued to work in Italy, where she later had some success with her 1992 comedy, Ciao, Professore!

Though now in her nineties, Lina Wertmüller continues to direct, commanding her sets with a watchful eye from behind her trademark white-rimmed glasses. Throughout her career, Wertmüller has gained both fierce fans and critics and has been called alternately “essential” and “grotesque.” But what is certain is that her divisive and daring work has forever cemented Lina Wertmüller’s reputation as one of the most accomplished and controversial Italian directors in history.

The Female Gaze

Seven Beauties pokes fun at men who see women as sexual objects, yet are also fiercely protective of the women in their own families. Here, Pasqualino expects his sisters to remain virgins and is extremely controlling over their lives. But he believes that all other women desire him sexually and treats them horrifically. There are two sex scenes that are very hard to watch—one involving a brutal rape, the other shot in a pointedly non-erotic fashion. Throughout Seven Beauties, Lina Wertmüller does not shy away from showing the audience the ugliest aspects of misogyny.

Fast Facts

★Lina Wertmüller first met Giancarlo Giannini in 1966, after casting him in Rita the Mosquito (which she made under the stage name George H. Brown). The two went on to collaborate many more times, with Giannini starring in several of her movies.

★For the sequel to Rita the Mosquito—called Don’t Sting the Mosquito—Enrico Job was the art director. Wertmüller and Job fell in love and remained married until his death in 2008.

★Wertmüller planned for the story of Seven Beauties to be told in a linear fashion, but found while editing it that a non-linear approach worked even better.

★After Wertmüller was nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards, she remained the only woman to have received that distinction for nearly twenty years until Jane Campion was nominated for The Piano in 1994.

Tomris Laffly on News from Home (1977)

To be a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant is to dwell in a constant state of melancholy. To adopt a new country is to split your identity into two, wondering if it will ever be whole again while your physical whereabouts clash with the invisible inner voices of family members and friends from the past. Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, peerless in the craft of experimental filmmaking that blurs the divide between documentary and fiction, grabs on to that imperceptible (and by all means, un-filmable) emotional confusion and turns it into poetry with News From Home. Call it a cinematic essay, an homage to the New York City sleaze of the ’70s, or a languid portrayal of alienation. News from Home is all of that, as well as an introspectively accurate illustration of being the other. As an immigrant who once stood on the intimidating edges of this well-oiled metropolitan machine called NYC (hoping to blend in, and maybe even belong), I find the exquisite pain of loneliness Akerman sketches out to be brutally exact.

In eighty-six meditative minutes, Akerman navigates the headspace of one such cultural outcast (herself) via unfussy methods. Along with cinematographers Jim Asbell and Akerman’s repeat collaborator Babette Mangolte, Akerman (never seen on camera here) films various streets, avenues, storefronts, and the graffiti-stamped subway cars of 1976 NYC through uncompromising long takes, representing the city’s estranging reality in the midst of a historically grim crisis of decay. She contrasts the eeriness of her purposely dim images with her own voiceover (sweet, fragile, and knowingly monotonous), reading a number of letters her loving mother wrote to her between the years of 1971–73, when Akerman lived across various neighborhoods of the city.