Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Most war movies are heroic, detailing either stories of sacrifice or survival, or both. Seven Beauties is a movie about a guy who does sacrifice, and survive, during World War II -- but there’s not a thing heroic about his story.

Giancarlo Giannini plays Pasqualino Frafusco, but is better known as Pasqualino Seven Beauties. I suppose he’s named so because it’s a good nickname for a smalltime criminal, and also because he has an almost unbelievable charm with women. He’s the sort of guy who, just by walking through the villa, can get women’s heads turning. Even he’s a little amazed at it -- he tells one guy in this movie that he’s always considered himself ugly, and is almost a little bothered by the fact that women find him so irresistible.

Pasqualino is not a sweet man, however. He’s fully embraced the stereotype of the Italian macho man, which plays a part in his need to defend his family honor. He feels that he has to protect the honor of his family name, and that of his mother and seven sisters. None of the sisters are particularly attractive, and will probably remain unmarried. That may include the eldest sister, even as she is promised marriage by a sleazy individual who gets her to work as a dancer at his burlesque club.

Pasqualino is disgusted at his sister’s flaunting in front of crude men (although if the woman on stage were any other women, I’d bet a million bucks that he’d be in the audience hooting and hollering along with the rest of them!!) To his sister’s face, he tells her that she’s disgraced the family and is turning into a wh-re. And he threatens to kill the man who’s made her this way.

After a comical altercation in which Pasqualino is called a “miserable worm” by the man before being knocked out on the floor, he goes later that night intending to shoot him dead. And he does. But the problem lays in the fact that Pasqualino didn’t allow the guy to draw a gun first, which would be critical if, and when, he is caught for the murder -- he won’t be able to claim self-defense. Pasqualino’s mob boss tells him that he needs to be creative in getting rid of the evidence -- so Pasqualino cuts up the body and sends the pieces in three suitcases to three different towns!!

All of this material, and the event afterwards, are in fact told as flashbacks, scattered along the story of Pasqualino’s life right now -- which is as a solider in World War II, caught in a truly horrific situation as he’s captured by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp, which is controlled by a cold, cruel and utterly imposing female commander (Shirley Stoler). The flashbacks set us up for what he will do in this concentration camp -- back home, he used his charm and his wits to try and get out of the worst situations. And he’s going to do his damnedest to make sure it works for him in this disgusting situation as well.

Seven Beauties was directed by Lina Wertmuller, who was also responsible for Love and Anarchy, and the great 1974 film Swept Away. Anyone who’s seen that latter film will understand that Wertmuller is crazy, outrageous, and shocking, as her story involved a battle of the sexes that was no-holes-barred to the point that many people would see the film as hateful and misogynistic! (and, yes, Wertmuller is a woman, which makes that opinion even more intriguing)

Seven Beauties is possibly every bit as outrageous, tasteless, and provocative as Swept Away was. But frankly, I wasn’t feeling any outrage, mainly because after actually coming to terms with how great Swept Away really was (after hating it many years ago), I’ve become extremely desensitized to anything that Wertmuller does. It could also be, however, because the movie is much more controlled, even as the script balances perilously between sober images and situations, and material that would be slapstick, vulgar or wacky in a different movie. The result is a movie that made history in one way -- Wertmuller became the first woman ever to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar on the basis of this film back in 1976.

During most of the flashback sequences, it’s either near-slapstick comedy or soapy melodrama (which is also comical). The scene with the dead body, for example, is closer to high slapstick than anything gross -- thankfully for me, because I was well expecting to see limbs being ripped apart! Pasqualino is in the room with the body and a suitcase of axes and other cutting tools, nervous and terrified, drinking in the hopes it will calm him down. He tries to move the body from the bed to the table in order to make the job easier, but the body is so heavy and fat (and makes farting and belching noises!!). We don’t see any hacking of lifeless bodies; the next scene is Pasqualino dropping three suitcases onto the street, awkwardly carrying them as sniffing dogs and other helpful people get into his path.

This kind of comedy exists in other scenes, but by this point some may question why it’s there. His plan to survive the concentration camp is to seduce the corpulent Nazi commander. It disgusts him to the very core, but he recalls something his mother told him when he was a child, about how all women, even the most evil, have some sugar and sweetness left in them. He uses this memory in order to begin doing all he can to try to break her down. There’s something that some will find inherently tasteless about the whole concept of this guy throwing kisses, making googly eyes and humming sweet melodies at a Nazi commander while people are being whipped, shot and hung all around him. Around these scenes, people are randomly shot. Piles of dead naked bodies are being loaded into trucks. A guy commits suicide by drowning himself in a pool of human waste.

The thing about the “comedy” in Seven Beauties is that it is in service of a very sinister motive. This is not “comic relief”. This is not a distraction from the main story. It’s a setup for something subversive and disturbing.

Throughout the movie, Pasqualino is a crude guy full of confidence based on machismo. He’s the sort of guy who uses aspects of his craft -- his charm, his way with women, his wits, etc -- in order to satisfy his need for self-preservation. He does this after he murders the club owner. He does this when he’s thrown into an insane asylum after his murder trial. And he does this when he’s thrown into a concentration camp.

His need for self-preservation will soon pit him into situations where he will have to make some truly ghastly choices if he wants to live. And trying to screw the Nazi commander isn’t even the worst of it.

And there is nothing funny about how this movie ends. But it’s the way it has to be.

What’s even more unsettling is the ultimate message of this film. The ones who survive are the ones like Pasqualino -- a guy with few thoughts except food, sex, survival, a low-class view of the world. The ones with pretenses of intellectualism, politics, whatever, are the ones who are doomed. Even more subversively, this goes for the Nazis as well as for those on the other side -- the Nazi commander herself is the one who brings up this theory to Pasqualino. In this world, the evil Nazi commander is no different from the more thoughtful folk in the camp whose ideals are no match for the suffering they experience under her thumb -- these people are doomed, while a “man of disorder” will be the new sort of people in the world.........

This is the sort of movie that some will find troubling. Mind you, I found it very fascinating. This is the perfect example of “black comedy” -- when most people think of “black comedy” they think of movies where we are supposed to laugh at people who experience bad things. But how will they take a movie where the comedy is actually disturbing? It’s not disturbing because it’s written by a warped mind. It’s not disturbing because someone wanted to shock for the sake of shock. It’s disturbing because what goes on in this movie is really an extreme version of what life really is when you look at it from a cold and detached angle -- as this movie does. Pasqualino says at one point that this farce, this comedy, this is what life is -- and that is what this story is. It’s a farce. It’s a comedy. How else can you describe it? If this movie were not about war, but about more mundane bad things that happen to this guy, wouldn’t we laugh? Wouldn’t we laugh if some guy tried to seduce a woman he didn’t like in order to save his skin, only to have things turn out not like he wanted them to be?

That’s what comedy is all about. It’s in looking at life, and seeing how absurd it all really is. This movie admits that the absurdity in life exists in more than just cute little silly things that we find easy to laugh about. It exists in the horror, in the worst things that people will do, or are forced to do. Sure, none of us are laughing at it any more. But it’s still a comedy.........


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening