Pasqualino Settebellezze by Lina Wertmüller

Nominated for four Academy Awards® including first woman ever nominated for Best Director, Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties stars Giancarlo Giannini as Pasqualino Frafuso, known in Naples as “Pasqualino Settebellezze” (Pasqualino Seven Beauties). A petty thief who lives off of the profits of his seven sisters while claiming to protect their honor at any cost, Pasqualino is arrested for murder and later sent to fight in the army after committing sexual assault. The Germans capture him and he gets sent to a concentration camp where he plots to make his escape by seducing a German officer.

SYNOPSIS:

The picaresque story follows its protagonist, Pasqualino (Giannini), a dandy and small-time hood in Naples in Fascist and World War II Italy. To save the family honour, Pasqualino kills a pimp who had turned his sister into a prostitute. To dispose of the victim’s body, he dismembers it and places the parts in suitcases. Caught by the police, he is convicted and sent to prison. Pasqualino succeeds in getting himself transferred to a psychiatric ward but, desperate to get out, he volunteers for the Italian Army, which is allied with the German army. With an Italian comrade, he eventually deserts the army, but they are captured and sent to a German concentration camp. In a bid to save his own life, Pasqualino decides to survive the camp by providing sexual favors to the obese and ugly female commandant (Stoler). His plan succeeds, but the commandant puts Pasqualino in charge of a barracks as a kapo. Here he must select six men to be killed to prevent all from being killed. Pasqualino ends up executing his former Army comrade, and he is responsible for the death of another fellow prisoner, a Spanish anarchist. At the war’s end, upon his return to Naples, Pasqualino discovers that ironically his seven sisters, his fiancée, and even his mother have all survived by becoming prostitutes.

Director: Lina Wertmüller
Italy, 1975, 116 min 
Film in Italian with English Subtitles

LOCATION 
Embassy of Italy 
3000 Whitehaven Street NW 
Washington, DC 20008

PREVIEW (via Youtube)

Wertmüller was born Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spañol von Braueich in Rome in 1928 to a devoutly Roman Catholic Swiss family of aristocratic descent. She was a rebellious child, and was expelled from more than a dozen Catholic schools. Though her father wanted her to become a lawyer she enrolled in theatre school. After graduating from school, her first job was touring Europe in a puppet show. For the next ten years she worked as an actress, director and playwright in legitimate theatre. During this period she met Giancarlo Giannini, who later starred in many of her films. Through her acquaintance with Marcello Mastroianni, she met Federico Fellini and, in 1962, Fellini offered her the assistant director position on 8½. The following year, Wertmüller made her directorial debut with The Lizards (I Basilischi). The film’s subject matter—the lives of impoverished people in southern Italy—became a recurring motif in her later work. Several moderately successful films followed, but not until the 1970s did Wertmüller achieve lasting international acclaim with a series of four movies starring Giancarlo Giannini. The last, and best-received of these, was 1975’s Seven Beauties (Pasqualino Settebellezze), which earned four Academy Award nominations and was an international hit. Wertmüller was the first woman nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director. Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig are the only other female directors nominated (with Bigelow the only to win). Her 1978 film, A Night Full of Rain, was entered into the 28th Berlin International Film Festival. Eight years later, her film Camorra (A Story of Streets, Women and Crime) was entered into the 36th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1985, she received the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry. She is known for her whimsically prolix movie titles. For instance, the full title of Swept Away is Swept away by an unusual destiny in the blue sea of August. These titles were invariably shortened for international release. She is entered in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest film title: Un fatto di sangue nel comune di Siculiana fra due uomini per causa di una vedova. Si sospettano moventi politici. Amore-Morte-Shimmy. Lugano belle. Tarantelle. Tarallucci e vino. That 1979 movie with 179 characters is better known under the international titles Blood Feud or Revenge.[citation needed] Her 1983 film A Joke of Destiny was entered into the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. Wertmüller has had a prolific career since, and still actively directs, though none of her later films have had the same impact as her mid-1970s collaborations with Giannini. Wertmüller was married to Enrico Job (died 4 March 2008), an art designer who worked on several of her pictures.