Word: gianninis
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...moment in Seven Beauties which epitomizes this harmony of vision and execution comes precisely when Wertmuller confronts her central theme: the moral and emotional impact of Nazi concentration camps on their victims. When Pasquale (Giancarlo Giannini) and his companion Francesco, deserters from the Italian army, are captured by the Germans and taken to a concentration camp, the greens and browns of the lush German countryside give way abruptly to stark grey and black. The camera pans chains of shell-shocked, pajama-clad prisoners, herded through this labyrinth of death by expressionless guards with drawn sub-machine guns and attack dogs...
...that those actions of Pasqualino's which appear to represent the most radical surrender of self-hood are animated by his desperate desire to preserve that self. Because Wertmuller focuses so intensely on the subjective character of Pasqualino's choices and presents him through the extraordinary comic talents of Giannini, she demands that we understand him as a person, and ultimately that we identify with and accept his decisions...
Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) is a survivor, and Lina Wertmuller's smashing new movie concerns both the ways he stays alive and the price he pays. Seven Beauties is a death-house comedy, brutal, audacious, liberating. As previous films like Love and Anarchy, The Seduction of Mimi and Swept Away demonstrate, Wertmuller takes a ringmaster's glee in barraging an audience with tawdry splendors and keeping it dazzled. She knows how to make us laugh, hard and long, even while we question ourselves for doing it. It is from the persistence of this questioning that Wertmuller gives...
Giancarlo Giannini is the storm center of the movie, and he acts Pasqual ino with sulfurous splendor. Giannini, with eyes of stinging intensity, has been leading man for Wertmuller in all her movies released in America. Like her, Giannini knows how to work right at the taproot of his character. There has been no one quite like him since Mastroianni, but Giannini shows an even wider range, not just of roles, but of spirit...
Image of Horror. The movie is vastly ambitious, but it is also jaunty and diverting. There is time for an affection ate send-up of Bertolucci: Giannini's en trance into a Neapolitan music hall, stupidly splendid with a cigarette holder and snap-brim hat, recalls The Conform ist. There are some good visual puns...