a man in disorder: a rotten comedy, a lousy farce
by Douglas Messerli
Lina Wertmuller (screenwriter and
director) Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties) / 1975, USA 1976
Although I saw Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties sometime after its
American release, I remembered little about it, although a kind a queasy
feeling prevented me for years from revisiting it. After watching it again the
other afternoon, I now perceive the reasons for my postponement. For this film
might be described, as Wertmuller has a character say about his wartime
experience, “it’s a rotten comedy, a lousy farce.” The very audaciousness of
basically creating a comedy, much of which takes place in a Nazi concentration
camp, is almost unthinkable (although figures from Charlie Chaplin to Mel
Brooks have approached the subject similarly), something for which Wertmuller
was condemned by figures such as concentration camp survivor, Bruno Bettelheim,
when the movie first premiered. Others hammered the openly macho attitude of
its central character, Pasqualino Frafuso (Giancarlo Giannini) and others could
not forgive its focus on such an absolutely self-serving figure as its “hero.”
Of course, Pasqualino “Settebelleze,” brother of seven quite ugly
sisters, is not truly a “hero,” but as critic Roger Ebert has described him, is
an absolute fool, a man who is “not brave, or bright, or even cynical or
cowardly.” Pasqualino is a Neapolitan braggart who might be metaphorically
described as a walking, talking penis, whose only mission in the world is to
penetrate and pleasure itself—and, obviously, to recreate itself—in short, to
survive. He is, as Pedro, an Anarchist Prisoner (Fernando Rey) describes a
potential savior of the race, “a man in disorder.”
Pasqualino, a local hood, who goes about with a gun strapped to his
pants, is inexplicably loved by all the local women, whom he equally seduces
and abandons. He has only one somewhat laudable value, “family honor”; but
given the unpleasant appearance of his sisters and the prewar economy—his whole
family shares a large room with several other families—it is a pointless
virtue. The eldest sister is already performing, quite miserably, at a local
dance hall, and, soon after is helped by her pimp boyfriend to join a brothel.
Egged on by the local Comorra head, Pasqualino kills the pig in his sleep,
cutting up the large body, packing it into three suitcases, and shipping them
each to a different destination. His efforts, however, have been for nothing, for
he is soon arrested, tried, and—after admitting, one might even say bragging
that he committed the act—found insane. Working in the hospital ward of the
asylum, he attempts to rape a woman bound to her bed, and is given shock
therapy. The only way out is for him to join the Fascist army.
He quickly deserts, along with a friend, Francesco (Piero Di Iorio), the
two of whom we first encounter in the film within a German forest, where they
come upon a mass murder by Germans of Jews, from which they run in horror.
While Francesco is disgusted with his own inability to “spit into the faces” of
the perpetrators, Pasqualino becomes even more determined to survive, breaking
into a German cottage to steal bread, meats, soup, and fruit. The robbery is
apparently reported, for while the two are enjoying their repast, Nazi soldiers
arrest them and take them to a concentration camp.
Wertmuller’s depiction of the camp is rather more disturbing than
Pasqualino’s behavior. The entire camp is represented as a large, quite
theatrical set, a white chalky dust floating through the air as prisoners are
randomly rounded up and shot, their bodies stacked into piles—all overseen by a
highly stereotypical German Prison Camp Commandant (Shirley Stoler), a large,
scowling woman with an ever-present whip in her paw. Such exaggerated conceits
merely aestheticize the tragedy of reality, while seemingly turning the
unspeakable into a kind of comic set up. For we know, by now, that the
desperate survivor, Pasqualino, will inevitably try to find a way into the
heart of this disgusting image of a woman. He does and succeeds, if you can
call their desperate groping and posturing a sexual “success.” But she, with a
heart even colder than his, sees through his transparent deception, punishing
him by putting him charge of his barracks and demanding that he choose six of
his fellow prisoners for the firing squad.
In the final scene of this deeply troubling movie, Pasqualino returns
home, the War over. Waiting for him are his mother and the seven beauties,
along with a young girl whom he had joked that he might one day marry. All have
survived through prostitution. What can he say when he has led a life more
deeply dishonest than them. He is still a penis: “I want lots of children” he yells
out to his young fiancée.
Strangely, for all of Pasqualino’s swaggering stupidity, he is also
loveable. As he admits, he is not handsome; as we perceive, he is not
admirable. Like some Rabelaisian figure, Pasqualino represents the worst in all
of us; and because we can still laugh or at least smile at him, this sacred
clown, this disordered being, salves our wounds for being part of the spiteful,
hateful human race.
So too does Wertmuller’s film come alive in the whirling vortex of her
abhorrent images. This is not reality, she reminds us, again and again, but a
kind of theater of the absurd, a representation of a world so criminally brutal
that it cannot truly be represented. It is a nightmare from which we seemingly
can never awake. It all makes for a rotten comedy, a lousy farce, but it
remains both a comedy and farce nonetheless.
Los Angeles, November 11, 2012
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (November 2012).
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment