Lena Wertmuller has created a fascinating cocktail, one part anti-war film, one part medieval morality play, one part black comedy, shaken vigorously and poured over plenty of fine acting.
If growing up in Fascist Italy doesn't give a young boy a slightly distorted sense of manhood, having your bricklayer father die leaving you the sole male in a family of a mother and seven sisters, made sure of the fact; so we find Pascolino, a handsome but strutting ladies' man who carries a pistol in his belt to "command respect." And so begins a roller coaster of events both comic and tragic that deliver him like so many other young men, into the maw of WW2, completely unprepared to cope with the stupidity and inefficiency of large governments at war, the contempt for both the sacred and the profane, the massacre of civilians unlucky enough to be in the way, the destructions of villages, towns, even entire cities, in short these young men are overwhelmed by the evil that is created from both sides of every war as surely and repetitively as an ocean beach is overwhelmed by the incoming tides.
Seven Beauties makes its anti-war thrust accessible like another more famous film, Catch-22, by blurring it's humor into the absurd. When Wertmuller shows us the vapidness of Pascolino's life as he struts around the family business or ghoulishly dismembering a body he killed, I think she is taking a more profound view of human existence than just an anti-war film, by showing us the inconsistencies, follies, and sin that inhabit everyday life, might even be the building blocks of national wars. Pascolino's supposed credo is respect, yet where is the respect in defending your sister's honor, if she is in love with her pimp; of challenging the pimp mano a mano, only to kill him by accident ; of volunteering to fight for his country, as a way to escape from a psychiatric ward; of shooting your friend, to save your own life; of finally returning home from defending your country, to find your seven sisters have become prostitutes? The inevitable question becomes, what is there to respect? Even the representative of authority and control, the prison camp commandant, is swept away by the follies of her own system and the temptations of power, while Pascolino is an Everyman, demonstrating the inevitable folly humankind falls into trying to live apart from God.
If growing up in Fascist Italy doesn't give a young boy a slightly distorted sense of manhood, having your bricklayer father die leaving you the sole male in a family of a mother and seven sisters, made sure of the fact; so we find Pascolino, a handsome but strutting ladies' man who carries a pistol in his belt to "command respect." And so begins a roller coaster of events both comic and tragic that deliver him like so many other young men, into the maw of WW2, completely unprepared to cope with the stupidity and inefficiency of large governments at war, the contempt for both the sacred and the profane, the massacre of civilians unlucky enough to be in the way, the destructions of villages, towns, even entire cities, in short these young men are overwhelmed by the evil that is created from both sides of every war as surely and repetitively as an ocean beach is overwhelmed by the incoming tides.
Seven Beauties makes its anti-war thrust accessible like another more famous film, Catch-22, by blurring it's humor into the absurd. When Wertmuller shows us the vapidness of Pascolino's life as he struts around the family business or ghoulishly dismembering a body he killed, I think she is taking a more profound view of human existence than just an anti-war film, by showing us the inconsistencies, follies, and sin that inhabit everyday life, might even be the building blocks of national wars. Pascolino's supposed credo is respect, yet where is the respect in defending your sister's honor, if she is in love with her pimp; of challenging the pimp mano a mano, only to kill him by accident ; of volunteering to fight for his country, as a way to escape from a psychiatric ward; of shooting your friend, to save your own life; of finally returning home from defending your country, to find your seven sisters have become prostitutes? The inevitable question becomes, what is there to respect? Even the representative of authority and control, the prison camp commandant, is swept away by the follies of her own system and the temptations of power, while Pascolino is an Everyman, demonstrating the inevitable folly humankind falls into trying to live apart from God.