Human Nature: 'Seven Beauties'

Nazi Germany seems to be the moral focal point of the 20th century, at least for the West. In arguments with humanists, existentialists, situationalists, it is still possible to get a consensus that Nazi crimes were wrong. So it becomes an occasion to ask what is wrong with humanity. Films keep probing the Nazi event asking, what led to it? (Cabaret) What was it like to be Jewish then? (Gardens of the Finzi-Continis, Lacomb Lucien) What was it like to be Christian? (The Hiding Place) Other movies have dealt specifically with Hitler and his inner circle.

In her earlier movie, Love and Anarchy, Italian director Lina Wertmuller depicted a young anarchist (Giancarlo Gianinni) who felt it was his duty to assassinate Mussolini, and tells the story of his failure. In her new movie, Seven Beauties, Pasqualino (again played by Giancarlo) is a cheap pragmatist, who has learned, possibly from being surrounded by his mother and seven sisters, how to charm women. Being a pragmatist, when his charm fails him, he has no qualms about using force.

Pasqualino’s trouble begins when he decides to protect his family honor. He ends up killing, not entirely intentionally, the man who wronged one of the “seven beauties” (his oldest sister) and bungles the job of disposing of his body. Pasqualino gets sent to prison, then to an insane asylum, and from there he manages to enter the military, where he deserts and ends up in a Nazi concentration camp.

Pasqualino is exactly the type a Fascist leader would expect a person to be. Aldous Huxley has said that the principle from which Hitler started was a value judgment: the masses are “incapable of abstract thinking and uninterested in any fact outside the circle of their immediate experience.” It seems that not acceding to those expectations can be more dangerous than to do so. On his way to the asylum Pasqualino tells a fellow prisoner that he is the “mad axe murderer of Naples” and that he got 12 years. The other, a socialist, says he got 21 years for thinking.

In a last-ditch attempt to stay alive in the concentration camp, Pasqualino tries out what remains of his charm on the female camp commandant. She eventually accepts him as the brunt of her sadism. He ends up prostituting himself in a way that is more degrading than his sister and not even for love.

The 200-pound icy-cold Nazi commandant is Pasqualino’s perfect foil. If he is the total pragmatist, she is the embodiment of Nazi idealism. Both of them have lost something of their humanity. She feels nothing for the sick and starving men she oversees. Pasqualino is less a person to her than a test case, a special experiment. She sees him as an “Italian worm,” incapable of understanding the goals of the master race.

Yet it is the worm who survives the Nazi system. The good people die protesting it, and their deaths are more a pro-life statement than Pasqualino’s sordid attempts to live.

Wertmuller’s sense of humor keeps the audience at a distance from the subject matter. It keeps the movie from being sentimental but also keeps it from being effective. She reduces the material to an entertainment although she obviously wants it to be a “statement.” Her subject matter, style, and message often seem unrelated.

In Love and Anarchy, the young anarchist was doomed for defeat from the beginning, and his Chaplinesque manner underscores this. His death is almost a symbol of the death of naiveté up against the system. But the scenes in Seven Beauties are representing real people who died, and it is funny only if you don’t think about the historical reality.

Wertmuller seems fascinated with order and anarchy. A camp inmate wishes for world order. Another answers, “No, the Germans have order. Man in disorder is the only answer.” Wertmuller’s answer to why man is evil obviously relates to the desire to impose false systems on reality and on other people. Yet total anarchy is impotent. It doesn’t produce effective action. The person who seeks only life, like Pasqualino, ends up losing it.

Beyond pragmatism and idealism, the third element that can be a compelling personal force, one even capable of tempering the pragmatist and the idealist, is love. It is because God is love and is living that Christianity can offer absolutes without becoming an ideology. Love is the element missing from Seven Beauties. That is why the movie may make you laugh but not hope.

Wertmuller is caught between her socialist ideology and her pragmatic keep-the-audience-reacting approach to film-making. Feminists who challenged her “women enjoy abuse” theme in Swept Away were told, “That was no woman; that was a symbol for capitalist society.” Yet what movie goers saw was the magnetism of the male and female stars.

Wertmuller’s characters caught in her dichotomy can’t act creatively. Or, if they do, they are allowed only one moment of existential protest -- and it doesn’t touch the rest of the world. Her anarchist attempts an assassination and gets killed. The cook in All Screwed Up dunks his fascist boss in a pot of spaghetti sauce and gets sent to an asylum. In Seven Beauties a socialist jumps in an open sewer and drowns. That is why critic Pauline Kael claims the message of Seven Beauties is that “human nature stinks and nothing can be done about it.”

Sharon Gallagher was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.