A Sicilian thug who defends honor in his family of sisters and finds politics boring is already a prime candidate for survival in Lina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties," a tragicomic Holocaust parable where one man's loss of scruples somehow becomes his own survival instincts.
The fabulously debonair Giancarlo Giannini is Pasqualino Frafuso, a low-level thug who prides himself on having an immaculate appearance. His family is huge - he has seven sisters and a mother. Pasqualino is the cock of the walk, tipping his hat to the women who all smile at him and moving about the city with grace. Wertmuller presents him in the opening scenes as a Hollywood noir-type, his profile encased in deliberate shadows like some Humphrey Bogart detective. He is far from being a smooth criminal, and far too impulsive. When he defends the family honor that has been sullied by his sister Concettina's flirtations while dancing at a club, he accidentally shoots the pimp she is willing to marry - her reasoning being that she will not end up as a spinster (Concettina is memorably played by Elena Fiore). For some reason, Pasqualino sees himself as repulsive yet he's anything but and, when he's captured by the police for the murder, he acts out and repeats Mussolini's speeches like a madman. The insane asylum is where Pasqualino is headed but his impulses do get him in trouble - he has sex with a woman strapped to a bed who tries to bite him! I have little sympathy for this "Monster of Naples" (who also cuts up the body of the pimp and has the body parts mailed to different parts of Sicily) yet I did find myself slowly empathizing with him.
"Seven Beauties" is not chronological and thank goodness for that - it is about Pasqualino ending up in a concentration camp after serving in the Italian Army. The camp houses Jews and some Italian prisoners who are used as manual labor in a quarry. Ashen-faced, bloodshot-eyed Pasqualino knows he might be executed and every day, the Nazi officers under the leadership of the main commandant (Shirley Stoler, in a truly unforgettable performance of sheer, calculated evil), randomly shoot a bunch of prisoners. Pasqualino decides to woo the commandant by whistling and singing in Italian. It turns out Stoler's commandant speaks Italian fluently and, in the most effectively scary scenes in the entire film, she asks him to have sex with her after he eats a hearty meal. If he can't maintain an erection, he will be killed. Erotic it is most decidedly not.
"Seven Beauties" juxtaposes colorful Italian neighborhoods with the grotesque nature of the camps and this constant segue between flashbacks and his terrifying ordeal is both mesmerizing and strangely beautiful. Pasqualino is reminded in flashbacks by his mother of how every woman has some core of goodness, a mere nugget waiting to be discovered. He does not find it in the emotionless commandant and, during a tumultuous final sequence, he finds no nuggets of goodness within himself either. Perhaps he knew all along, perhaps not. Of all the Holocaust tales that have been made in the 20th century, this one is rich in irony, black humor and in the willfulness of people. Giannini's Pasqualino is proof that not every concentration camp survivor was a saint.
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