Word: pasqualino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...battle her early experience as a playwright and rely more on images. She will actually film two versions of all major scenes, one with talk, one without. "One of the most difficult decisions I've ever had to make was the courtroom scene in Seven Beauties. Between Pasqualino and the girl he eventually marries I had beautiful dialogue! Beautiful! But in the end I knew they had said everything just by looking at each other...
WHILE SEVEN BEAUTIES does not say directly that survival through collaboration and murder is preferable to death in defense of human values, the whole emotional thrust of the film implies that conclusion. Certainly, Wertmuller presents the opposing case, but whenever characters speak against Pasqualino's point of view, they do so in abstract rhetorical terms without a context that could lend any human meaning to their arguments. When Pasqualino and Francesco argues that the two of them are as guilty as the Germans since they are doing nothing to prevent it. But this is simply an inauthentic rendition of stock...
...camps, Wertmuller does portray alternative choices to those of Pasqualino in more fully rounded terms. The situation there is awful enough to make total refusal intelligible, and the character of the old anarchist (Fernando Rey), who continues to affirm his ideal of "man' in disorder" despite a set of crushed testicles, is a touching vignette. Nevertheless, the deaths of Francesco and the anarchist in defiance of the Nazis represent a purely negative gesture. Their renunciation of life based on abstract principles have little to do with the way men lead their lives; collective suicide is simply not a viable moral...
...forces entirely beyond their control, and for Wertmuller they can only choose how to submit to the situations that confront them pre-formed. Seven Beauties opens with black and white montage of World War II newsreels, clips of Hitler and bombings, which eventually leads into the wreck that allows Pasqualino to desert the troop train and plunges him into the Nazi inferno. The social conditions constraining the characters' action stand outside the narrative itself, temporally distant, colored differently, and represented impersonally. Only when the situation is fully formed and unchangeable can Wertmuller abandon this abstract style to focus...
From this perspective, it is easy to see why Pasqualino appeals to Wertmuller. If men cannot change the world, though it is a terrible place, then they must do what is necessary to survive, since there is no alternative other than death in the name of abstract principles. Given this tragic condition, the only attribute Wertmuller as an observer can take is that of ironic contemplation, exercising a comic acceptance of all the absurdities of human life. It is this fundamental pessimism in Wertmuller's world view which accounts for the coexistent strains of tragedy and comedy i her films...