With the
world premiere of Seven Beauties in
France in May 1975, Lina Wertmüller not only maintained the buzz
surrounding her since Love and Anarchy three years before, but reached
what turned out to be her career zenith. No other filmmaker had created such a brand of biting, individually
rendered satire since Preston Sturges’ run of Hollywood comedies in the early
1940s.
Then, like
Sturges, Wertmüller made the mistake of releasing a movie that didn’t make
money—and found her critical cachet as depleted as her box office grosses.
Even
notoriously acerbic movie critic John Simon hailed her in a New York
Magazine cover story as “The Most Important Film Director Since Ingmar
Bergman."
Such was the acclaim and attention that she became the first female
to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar with this film, briefly reminding
Hollywood that women had been at the forefront of industry back in the silent
era.
Her iconoclastic
views on class, sex, and politics in The Seduction of Mimi, Love and
Anarchy, and Swept Away—all featuring Giancarlo Giannini as
an antihero—set the stage for this latest triumph, at a time when loosened
censorship made these topics a matter of incessant debate among cinephiles.
What made
her work so compelling—and, at the same time, flummoxed many viewers—was
Wertmuller’s refusal to fit neatly into an ideological box. Professedly a
socialist, she gravitated more toward anarchism. (Pedro, a philosophical concentration
camp inmate, echoes the director’s belief that “A new man in disorder is our
only hope.”) Though a trailblazing female director, she evinced little interest
in feminism.
The
filmmaker’s creative methods were as unconventional as her subjects. The
supercharged, slapstick energy of the films of her prime derives from her early
training in the Italian commedia dell'arte form, characterized by
extensive improvisation.
Most of
the film’s scorn is directed at Giannini’s Pasqualino Frafuso, a
small-time Neapolitan hood sarcastically nicknamed “Seven Beauties” for the
group of homely sisters whose honor he continually boasts of protecting.
Flashbacks
detail how his foolish machismo lead him to kill one sister’s pimp, fall
into the hands of the police (right after boasting loudly that he’d never be
taken alive), fake insanity to avoid jail, volunteer for service in Mussolini’s
army when he fears he will go crazy with other lunatics, desert from the
Eastern Front, and find himself in a German concentration camp. He is now face
to face with the question: how far will he go to survive?
That turns
out to be desperately far: first, when he decides to seduce the grotesque,
pitiless female camp commandment, then when given charge of fellow
inmates—including with responsibility for selecting who will live and who will
die.
The lesson
that Wertmuller drives home—that the horrors of Fascism become possible not
just by political criminals who seize control of the state, but by the supine
complicity of ordinary citizens—comes early in the film, when Pasqualino and
fellow army escapee Francesco stumble upon Nazi soldiers perpetrating a
massacre against helpless prisoners in an open field.
Carefully
hiding while watching helplessly from a distance, Pasqualino and Francesco
debate what they could have done. Francesco says that they are accomplices in
the atrocity: “We didn't make a sound, didn't come out and spit in their faces.”
Nothing
doing, Pasqualino counters: that would just be a “useless suicide.”
But
Francesco persists: “No, it wouldn't have been useless because in the face of
certain things you've got to say no, and instead I said yes to Mussolini, to
duty, and to all that crap.”
As
demonstrated in Maureen Orth’s October 1975 profile in Newsweek,
Wertmuller indulged her penchant for non-professional actors by including the
American journalist (originally on a brief leave of absence as her assistant)
and her mother among the extras as a prostitute and her madam.
Like
mentor Federico Fellini (for whom she worked on 8½), she sought
unusual, sometimes grotesque, faces. Moreover, she often preferred visual to
verbal instructions forgoing a translation of her remarks to the American actress Shirley Stoler, saying, “I don’t care if she understands what I say, I just
want her to imitate what I do.”
Despite
its considerable critical acclaim, Seven Beauties has not lacked
detractors, then or now. Like Wertmuller’s prior films, it featured graphic
violence (including rape, which has troubled many feminists who would otherwise
champion her work).
Although
its depiction of the Nazi death camps is grim, its tone veers as often into the
satiric as the sorrowful. In the opening minutes, grainy black-and-white images
of World War II contrast with a sardonic male voice-over intoning, “Oh, yeah”
two dozen times (“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.”)
The
repetition feels much like the “so it goes” mantra that Kurt Vonnegut used to
comment on the senseless carnage of that conflict in Slaughterhouse Five.
The sequence is a necessary prelude to
understand how Pasqualino will exhibit the amoral survival instincts of a
cockroach.
Furthermore,
though the Nazi victims onscreen include political dissidents and deserters,
none are specifically identified as Jewish, even though that group was the
major target of Nazi extermination schemes. That fact is all the more
surprising given that Wertmuller based her screenplay on an Italian-Jewish
death-camp survivor who, like Pasqualino, killed his sister’s pimp—and whom she
even cast as an extra.
Seven
Beauties opened in
broader release around the world in the fourth quarter of 1975, giving it
exposure for Oscar consideration. In the end, the film came away with four
nominations (including for Wertmuller and Giannini) but no wins. (Even in the
Best Foreign Film category, it lost to Black and White in Color.)
For a
while, it seemed that Wertmuller’s white eyeglasses would become as synonymous
with Italian cinema as Fellini’s Borsalino fedora. Hollywood even came calling,
courtesy of a four-film contract she signed with Warner Bros. But after the
failed English-language A Night Full of Rain (1978), the studio canceled
the remaining three projects.
The
filmmaker returned to Italy, making 16 more films for the big screen—each one
progressively more strident and less available in America than the last.
Yet
the likes of Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, and Greta Gerwig owe
her a debt for making manifest the possibilities inherent in a female
director’s vision—and Hollywood recognized that contribution by awarding her an
Honorary Award, at age 91, for her career in 2019, two years before her death.
With
Eurocommunism in fashion in the year of the release of Seven Beauties, few
could have predicted the end of Marxism as a viable force. But fewer still
could have guessed that far-right nationalism would stage a comeback in
Wertmuller’s Italy a half-century later, let alone that it would enter the
United States.
That
situation makes viewing Seven Beauties far more disturbing today than it
was at the time. Its opening minutes of World War II footage immediately
connect an ignorant, benighted, machismo-dominated populace to life in a
dictatorship.
Thinking,
a socialist tells Pasqualino while the two are awaiting prison, is “the most
atrocious crime a citizen could commit.” In the present state of democracies
worldwide, thinking is as dangerous as Wertmuller’s political prisoner
suggests, but also as much of an absolute necessity.
