The Talkies
Asahina, Robert
by Robert Asahina Seven Beauties, the latest film of Italian director/ writer Lina Wertmliller, is now showing in Manhattan along with four of her previous movies (Swept Away..., All Screwed Up,...
...There is an obvious and vulgar explanation, of course, for the Wertmilller vogue: She is the only female director at work today who is both well-known and talented, even if she is by no means as talented as allegedly tough-minded critics are making her out to be...
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...She claimed that feminists who criticized her were mistaken, because (as she said in an interview with Molly Haskell) "the Mariangela Melato character was really a man...
...To survive the horrors of the concentration camp, he decides to collaborate, by making love to the female camp commandant (played by 250-pound Shirley Stoler), choosing six of his fellow prisoners to be exterminated, and personally executing a close companion...
...Does Swept Away...
...This explanation, however, does justice neither to Wertmiiller nor to her partisans...
...In Seven Beauties she has indulged that nihilism straightforwardly by providing a moral freak show where the shocks are the sole entertainment, presented in gripping scenes with ideas as mere window-dressing...
...Is it that survival justifies anything...
...After pleading guilty to the crime by reason of insanity, he is committed to an asylum, where he rapes a madwoman strapped to a bed, undergoes shock therapy, and effects his release by volunteering for the Italian army...
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...Seven Beauties will play in Peoria, and will probably play to packed houses...
...The film tells the story of a Neapolitan, Pasqualino Seven Beauties—so called because of his seven sisters—at the time of the Second World War...
...This is true most of all of Seven Beauties, which has been acclaimed as a masterpiece establishing Wenn-Miler in the company of such worshipped directors as her former mentor, Federico Fellini...
...The only operative criterion for both the generation and the assessment of such scenes is the intensity of the shocks—and the more shocking, the better...
...That men should enjoy what years ago would have been called a "women's picture," if it had been made in Hollywood, can be partially accounted for by its graphic presentation of male sexual dominance...
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...Yet it was also typically confused—and ultimately empty...
...Yet as suggested by the proliferation of massage parlors and fiscal crises throughout the rest of America, the Manhattanization of the United States has proceeded steadily...
...by Robert Asahina Seven Beauties, the latest film of Italian director/ writer Lina Wertmliller, is now showing in Manhattan along with four of her previous movies (Swept Away..., All Screwed Up, Love and Anarchy, and The Seduction of Mimi...
...That liberal capitalists are sexy and weak...
...WertmUller is a talented filmmaker, but her real genius lies in her shrewd ability to both seduce and shock, to feed the nihilism of her audiences...
...What's done is done...
...After a long period of being slapped into submission, she becomes his servile sexual slave, and they share an idyllic "romance...
...mean to say that the triumph of socialism is not possible in the real world...
...The scene was simultaneously gripping, disgusting, and (at least to some of the audience when I saw it) funny...
...derives mainly from its powerful element of another kind of romance—the romance of ideas...
...Although time may eventually dampen some of their enthusiasm, and although critical distance may ultimately intervene to offer some perspective, her supporters are responding to her movies in ways that go beyond feminist ideology...
...but when they are stranded alone together on a deserted island, the tables are predictably turned...
...please print) Name Address City State Zip Date of change •• ^ • • • • • • •• • • • * a * • • • • • • • •• a • • • • • • •• • • • • . .. • • There is • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •^ • •. .• opportunity UR • • ^ • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • . • in America...
...That Life is miserable and degrading...
...It is as difficult to understand the concerns of the movie as it is ultimately irrelevant...
...And, sure enough, their island romance does not survive the test, and there is a fashionably downbeat ending...
...continued on page 39) 34 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 TALKIES (continued from page 34) It is only when we reflect upon individual scenes that we understand how little the clarity of the ideas matters next to the impact of the cinematography...
...Some idea of the intellectual confusion that results from, and is found in, the experience of her movies was apparent last fall in the reaction to Swept Away..., which concerns the relationship between a blond-, liberal, rich bitch (Mariangela Melato) and a swarthy, macho, socialist sailor (Giancarlo Giannini) on a Mediterranean cruise...
...WertmUller indulged the romantic fantasies of disaffected intellectual nihilists by camouflaging a banal love story—which otherwise would have been scorned for what it is—with• beautiful images and trendy ideas...
...This is no mere island romance, as in the old Hollywood days, but a foreign film, with characters who actually talk about politics, who seemingly embody the contradictions of class and sex...
...Even in New York, the simultaneous showing of five films by a single director is something of a feat in itself, but Wertmtiller's work has also met with almost unanimous critical, as well as popular, approval...
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...That nihilism is good...
...But what are they responding to...
...But he manages to survive, and returns to Naples at the end of the war, only to find that all of his sisters have become whores, as well as the one girl who had promised to wait for him...
...In one scene, the prisoner who had been the spokesman for humanism (Fernando Rey) commits suicide, after witnessing Pasqualino's betrayal of his fellow prisoners, by diving into a trough of human excrement, where he is promptly machine-gunned by the camp guards...
...Who would choose to die in such a grotesque fashion, even given the extremities of the concentration camp...
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...That natural man beats his mate...
...In Seven Beauties, too, Wertmilller's stunning cinematography and the illusion of intellectuality add glitter to what is basically a trash of mindless conceptions...
...He quickly deserts, but is as quickly captured by the Germans...
...Movie reviewers like to cloak their own visceral responses in respectable intellectual frameworks—and WertmUller has obligingly provided both the shocks and the signals by which to interpret them in stunning and impressive quantity...
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...That Pasqua-lino is Everyman who survives only by a moral anarchy that matches the situations he is trapped in...
...But I suspect that the popularity of Swept Away...
...That nihilism is bad...
...She's a symbol of bourgeois enlightenment...
...The facile seductiveness of films is contagious...
...Perhaps too, audiences were enthralled by the romance between the movie's cardboard characters...
...after all, beneath the most cynical hide often beats a heart of mush...
...ThatThe Mindlessness of Lina Wertmiiller is surprisingly difficult to determine, for the critical accolades to her films differ widely, and differ as well from Wertmiiller's own assessment of her work...
...That socialists are sexy...
...You're alive...
...The movie doesn't mean anything—it merely is, and we experience it in a morally neutral, and ultimately mindless, fashion...
...During the first part of the movie, she abuses him as a lowly deckhand...
...The gilding on that old Hollywood trash is the glitter of The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 33 trendy ideas, and the fact that those ideas are muddled only contributes to the glamour—imagine all the interpretations, all the discussions, all the controversy...
...Of course, there is no end to the questions that could be raised about such scenes, and perhaps this helps to explain the peculiar congruence of professional and popular opinion about Seven Beauties, indeed about all of WertmUller's films...
...What difference does it make that the ideas are mere cliches...
...is that audiences and critics could be so enthusiastic about a movie with such a hackneyed andformula-ridden plot...
...In Seven Beauties, as in Swept Away..., Wertmtiller has presented a series of impressively staged scenes—in this case, scenes not of chic love, but of a nihilistic comic-strip parade of grotesque characters in grotesque situations...
...No matter that the signals are often garbled: the very profusion of ideas se-duces intellectuals into thinking that she is profound, and the variety of interpretations thus made possible is the critic's lifeblood...
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...Seven Beauties is a horror film in which moral dilemmas are used only as the pretext for shocking scenes milked for their entertainment value...
...When the oldest of his sisters becomes a whore, Pasqua-lino (played by Giancarlo Giannini again) murders and dismembers her pimp, topreserve the family honor...
...But they are eventually presented with an opportunity for rescue—which he insists that they take, against her wishes, in order to test their "love" in the real world...
...Wertmtiller herself, an avowed socialist and feminist, offered the most bizarre interpretation...
...For although we are presented with a variety of genuine moral dilemmas—the weighing of personal survival against the betrayal of one's comrades, for instance—the scenes in which such dilemmas are posed are empty of moral and cognitive content, leaving only the shock value of the dazzling cinematic virtuosity...
...By the same token, the increasingly large number of shallow but "well-informed" moviegoers—who respond viscerally to films but lack the intellectual equipment to articulate their appreciation —seize upon films over which they can argue endlessly, fueled with the latest opinions of their favorite reviewers...
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...It would be comforting to think that the Wertmaller vogue is confined to upper Manhattan...
...That socialists are sexists...
...As the movie ends, we get the philosophy he has learned through all his hardships: "Don't think about the past...
...Why a humanist...
...The film, of course, is about Life and Death—but what about them...
...Perhaps everybody was merely swept away by the breathtaking photography of the blue Mediterranean and of the bronzed bodies cavorting in the surf and on the sand...
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...Why a trough of excrement...
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...The most surprising thing about the success of Swept Away...
...In Swept Away...
...But that women should enjoy such a "romance"—and they do—is puzzling, unless those old canards about innate female masochism and sexual submissiveness somehow apply to many more women than anyone has recently imagined...
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...she represents bourgeois society, therefore she represents the man...
Vol. 9 • May 1976 • No. 8
