Seven Beauties (aka Pasqualino Settebellezze)

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Artykuł zawiera spoilery!

Lina Wertmuller is a brilliant director, and she has a cast here that is up to her standards.

Lina Wertmuller wrote and directed this motion picture, which was released in 1975. It stars Giancarlo Gianinni as the title character, Shirley Stoler, Fernando Rey, and a host of excellent supporting actresses and actors. The film got Wertmuller the first nomination of a woman as Best Director for the Oscars. Her use of music and silence is brilliant.

"Seven Beauties" starts with our hero on the lam in Germany, an Italian soldier trying to desert to his home in Napoli. In flashbacks throughout the film, we see episodes of Pasqualino Seven Beauties before the war as a young man with aspirations to the Mob. Through a series of misadventures involving murder and an insane asylum, Pasqualino ends up in the Italian army in Germany, where he promptly deserts. The Germans capture him and send him to a concentration camp. Throughout the film, in flashbacks and in the present, Pasqualino's goal is to live. And he gets his wish.

Naturally, much goes on in the years between the Thirties and the Forties, when the film ends. Wertmuller is relentless in her hatred of the Nazis and the Fascists. There is enough polemic in the film to get her point across, but not so didactically that it becomes preachy. Some of the characters clearly have no point but to show the intelligence of socialism or the bravery of honor. But what Pasqualino has to show us is the squalor and degradation of the Nazis.

If the purpose of good literature is to show us the development of character, Wertmuller shows it in spades through Pasqualino and his family. The price of staying alive is high.

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In a flashback the movie shows us Pasqualino, his mother, and his sisters during the Depression before World War II. They live in Napoli, and his mother is widowed, so Pasqualino assumes that the's head of the family. Although they are poor, Pasqualino is very happy. He dresses well, he carries a gun, and he feels respected. His oldest sister, however, is 38, and she feels spinsterhood approaching. She's fat and ugly and has no prospects. She falls for a pimp who tells her he'll make her a star and then he'll marry her. Her goal in life is to feel loved, she falls for his line, and he puts her on stage in a skimpy costume then into a brothel. Prostitution is a metaphor throughout Wertmuller's movie.

Pasqualino murders the pimp, disposes of the body, is caught and confesses. Told by his lawyer that his only chance to avoid the death penalty is to plead insanity, Pasqualino refuses, claiming the family's honor is more important. Awaiting trial, however, Pasqualino realizes that life is better than an honorable death, and he begins spouting Il Duce's speeches to his fellow inmates. His lawyer gets him sentenced to treatment in an asylum. Staying alive, too, is a repeating theme in "Seven Beauties."

Wertmuller realized that one of the genius ideas of the Nazis was to make us all complicit in their atrocities. Throughout the movie, Pasqualino observes atrocities and remains silent over the objections of others around him. Eventually his silent acquiescence leads to action, as he becomes a participant in the murders of those imprisoned with him. While others choose honorable death, Pasqualino chooses to remain alive.

It's not a bargain with the devil. It's not a choice we can blame on others. It's the choice of Pasqualino. To live, he has to prostitute himself to the Nazi camp commandant. "Seven Beauties" is an indictment of the Nazis and all their fellow travelers, but an understanding one. Sergei Eisenstein showed us in "Battleship Potemkin" that the drama lies in individual stories not in masses, and Wertmuller shows us the corruption of all of Germany through the individual story of Pasqualino. The Nazi path is a 12-step program which leads not to recovery and redemption but to the sickness that was the Nazi party. Blind obedience to the Nazis leads to hell. Pasqualino's wish to live was granted, and the Furies will hound him with the living hell of his memories.

After you've seen "Seven Beauties," watch "Catch 22" and pay attention to Yossarian's conversation with the old Italian man.

If "Seven Beauties" has not sated your appetite for things Nazi, I recommend with reservations "The Kindly Ones," a novel by Jonathon Littell. I review the novel here:
http://philip.tumblr.com/post/502394672/a-review-of-the-kindly-ones-by-jonathan-littell
In a way, it parallels Pasqualino's journey, though from the inside - it is a tale told by a Nazi SS officer. It's a difficult book, so be warned.

For serious students, I recommend reading a short article about Mel Brooks at
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/010820/archive_038235.htm
where Brooks says you can't take on monsters like Hitler in a direct manner --
they'll always win if you take them seriously and argue their behavior with them. Hitler was famous for seducing his listeners with his rhetoric. Brooks believes the only way to win against tyrants is to mock them and show how crazy they are. Brooks says he attacks the horror of the holocaust with the only weapon that works - ridicule of the perpetrators. Was Wertmuller mocking the Nazis with "Seven Beauties"?

Then contrast Brooks's view with that of Bruno Bettelheim in his essay about "Seven Beauties" called "Surviving." Brooks served in the army in World War II and saw the streams of refugees but not the concentration camps. Bettelheim is, as he put it, one of the all too few survivors of the camps. Bettelheim's view of the film and its comic aspects is one of outrage and disgust. Actually, I'm not sure outrage is strong enough to describe his feeling. He excoriates Wertmuller and everyone who gave the film a good review.

I checked out "Surviving and Other Essays" from my library. I recommend reading the "Surviving" essay to get a taste of what it's like to have survived a concentration camp. It has a lasting effect, and Bettelheim is extremely upset with the effect shown on Pasqualino. His other essays in the book may be of interest, as well.

I contemplated a meaningful dialogue between Mel Brooks and Bettelheim, but I'm not sure it could have happened, given Bettelheim's experience. He was a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago after his escape to America, and he practiced at a school for emotionally disturbed children. Bettelheim's specialty was treatment of the autistic. Unsurprisingly, he suffered from depression. In 1990 at the age of 86 he committed suicide - he was widowed and suffering from the effects of a major stroke.