Seven Beauties

One of the most controversial directors in Italy, Lina Wertmuller provides with Seven Beauties one of the best examples of her work. It is certainly her most successful - it was nominated for several Oscar awards that year - and as in her previous work it's debatable both in terms of its form and content. Aesthetically it matches the brilliance of The Seduction of Mimi but Wertmuller's preoccupation with issues which have become the source of major traumas, elevates Seven Beauties into a sphere of its own.

Pasqualino Frafuso or as he is commonly known "Pasqualino Seven Beauties" (Giancarlo Giannini) is a Napolitan who lives at the expense of his sister's work. One of them is seduced by a man who persuades her into prostitution. Pasqualino - faithful to the family's strict code of honour - murders him and mails his pieces all over Italy. To his misfortune he is arrested and thrown into an asylum but there he rapes an inmate and as a consequence he is sent to fight on the Eastern Front. His luck though seems to have abandoned him since he is caught by the Nazis and put in a concentration camp. But cunning Napolitan as he is he manages to seduce the Nazi commandant after he has been humiliated by her. Returning to Naples he finds that all he did and suffered for - namely the honour of his family, proved futile since all his sisters prostitute themselves to American soldiers...

Seven Beauties provides a truly incomparable treatment of serious themes in a satirical tragi-comic manner which typical to Wertmuller's style is often uncomfortable to watch. She intelligently operates with flashbacks juxtaposing the bitterly funny incidents in Naples with the atrocities of the Nazis in the concentration camps caustically criticising the abominable state which Pasqualino has reached in order to maintain the honour of his family. The influence of Fellini is clear in several sequences but Wertmuller's gift in constructing beautiful imagery renders this one an almost independent (in aesthetic terms) piece of work. Giancarlo Giannini is astounding in the main role and additionally there is a great cameo by Fernando Rey, Buñuel's favourite actor. Love it or hate it, it is undoubtedly worth watching and its handling of issues ranging from anarchy to sexuality is witty. stimulating and controversial.

Review by Spiros Gangas
Taken from EUFS Programme 1993/94