Word: pasqualino
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...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...
Seven Beauties is a knockabout mockery of a cherished notion: that just to go on drawing breath is worth any sacrifice, a goal beyond any scruple. This is certainly an idea to which Pasqualino Frafuso clings with all the fervor in his Neapolitan soul. Nicknamed "Seven Beauties," in ironic allusion to his seven lumpish sisters, Pasqualino struts and flirts for all the women in Naples and looks for "respect" from the local...
Plea of Insanity. Pasqualino had hoped to impress the don not so much with the crime but with his novel means of corpse disposal. He is undone by a furious, hysterical Concettina (Elena Fiore) and brought to justice. A man of vocal but flexible honor, Pasqualino will not cop a plea of insanity until he understands that the only alternative is the death penalty. With a little help from the don, Pasqualino draws twelve years in an asylum...
...moves, then, from one kind of madness to another. A friendly doctor gets him bounced from the hospital-where, overcome by months of tethered ardor, he tried to rape a woman patient-and into the army. For Pasqualino, the second World War is a survival course which requires all his back-alley resources. He fakes being wounded by stealing the bandages from a dead soldier, thus avoiding assignment to the Russian front. He deserts, gets caught by Nazis and is imprisoned in a concentration camp where dead bodies hang from the ceiling and litter the floor like parched, trampled leaves...
...this charnel house, the kind of madness that Pasqualino perpetrated on a smaller scale becomes massive. To stay alive, Pasqualino must summon up his last reserves of cunning. In one horrible, hilarious sequence, he tries to worm his way into the good graces of the female camp commandant (Shirley Stoler) by making love to her. She is a lesbian leviathan who tolerates his attentions only because of his very desperation. She uses his appetite for life to debase him, and he allows it. He even agrees to preside over the execution of fellow prisoners. All for survival...