Review of Seven Beauties (1975) by Art S — 26 Jul 2016

Giancarlo Giannini seems to be hamming it up comically in his part as a wannabe macho loser in Naples during Mussolini's rise to power. But director Lina Wertmuller puts him through the meat grinder instead.

First, he accidentally kills his sister's pimp and gets 12 years in the insane asylum. Then, after raping another inmate, he is freed in order to fight in WWII but deserts and is captured by the Germans and placed in a concentration camp.

In order to survive, he decides to seduce the queen bitch female commandant but she has other tortures planned for him. Wertmuller cheerfully ignores the boundaries of good taste but manages to say something about shame and degradation.

Is it better to humiliate oneself (and even commit atrocities) in order to walk away alive or should one sacrifice one's meaningless existence for a moral principle, even when the sacrifice will have no effect? Maybe we'd all choose the latter (or we'd like to think we would) but not Giannini.

He suffers instead. There is a Fellini-esque flavour to the proceedings but things get much darker than the maestro chose to go.