On Screen

...His military career begins when a female doctor he has cajoled tells him that Mussolini is taking even murderers into the Army, so long as they can prove they are sane (Wertmuller's irony is often a little heavy...

...Through The Seduction of Mimi, Swept Away, All Screwed Up, and Seven Beauties, she has poked fun at Italian men, at a sexual code that mistakes women for property and property rights for moral integrity, and at a society that prizes washing machines above human beings...

...It's all we've got...

...Pasqualino is a reluctant executioner...

...there is no voice to counter Pedro's terrible prophecy...

...In Seven Beauties, for instance, the ugliness of the sex scene between Pasqualino and the Commandant is matched by an earlier one in which he rapes a madwoman...

...When Don Rafaello, a Mafioso who is Pasqualino's boss, then tells him he can't employ people who are not respected, Pasqualino proceeds to kill his sister's pimp-lover, Totonno—a murder, we notice, that is not "for a woman" at all...

...The exception is the Italian Lina Wertmuller, whose newest film, Seven Beauties, clearly establishes her as the most important director around right now...

...Against all odds, because survival is all that matters to him, Pasqualino is able to will his penis to stand up...

...The Italian Front, we learn, has collapsed, and these two have escaped into Germany from a train carrying troops to Russia...

...and the Nazis, whose urge for biological transcendence has become so divorced from feelings as to render them death machines...

...He resolves to make a conquest of the Commandant (Shirley Stoller), a Valkyrian lady with blond braids circling an impassively murderous face...

...Though Santa and his wife, in the same film, haven't the money to feed themselves, they give birth to twins, then to quintuplets, and then to an eighth child whom they cannot bring themselves to abort...

...Yet the love affair that focused these relations was so delicious to the lovers and so erotically visualized for us, we were left wondering where Wertmuller stood...

...Seven Beauties, however, makes clear that for her, the political dimension of life is not simply one among others that we can ignore...

...People in Wertmuller's films are vessels for survival and reproduction...

...If you don't fuck, then kaput...

...The film closes with his return to postwar Naples...

...Yet her own vitality—so full of discontent, of irony and imagination—is a kind of affirmation...

...It is the dimension that distinguishes human existence from the merely biological, and the apolitical man, therefore, is not fully human...

...He will marry the girl who has waited for him...

...As the black and white modulates gradually to color, we find ourselves in some murky place with two Italian soldiers, Pasqualino and Francesco...

...In any case, Pedro adds, the world will soon be so overpopulated, people will be killing each other for an apple...

...The woman in Swept Away falls in love with the man because he knows how to feed himself on a deserted island...

...He has no ideas, no ideals, she says, and in retaliation, she commands him to choose six prisoners to die...

...Sometimes one has to say No, his friend replies...

...Business stops for a moment and then continues at its usual furious pace...

...You're the oldest of them, and if you become a whore, so will all the rest.' She does...

...But fear is the stronger motive, and he even shoots his best friend when ordered to do so...

...Moreover, if love (or, for that matter, anarchy), doesn't come off very well in these films, it seems nonetheless a messy conjunction of the animal and the human, the self and nonself, that in Wertmuller's view is humanity's saving grace...

...someone periodically answers...

...Wertmuller does not try in this film to understand how people become Nazis...

...And he tells her they must have children to help defend them against those who will be killing each other for an apple...

...Oh yeah...

...Wertmuller doesn't really offer a solution...

...Through a hedge they see people in the distance moving slowly, wearing white—perhaps a village procession of some kind, a wedding or a funeral...

...to have resisted would have been suicide...

...The sound of artillery is all around them...

...An off-screen narrator, referring to the Italians, intones: "the ones who worship the corporate image not knowing they work for someone else,' "the ones who sing the National Anthem," "the ones who sleep soundly even with cancer," "the ones who are afraid of flying," "the ones who have never had a fatal accident," "the ones who believe Christ is a young Santa Claus...

...The title of the first Wertmuller work released in this country— Love and Anarchy—announced her theme, and she has been playing variations on the dialectic between sex and politics ever since...

...Her portrait of Pasqualino—a caricature of the sleazy Latin Lover who brings happiness, he thinks, to any woman he favors with a pinch, a wink, a smile or a flower—is such a man...

...Pedro, a fellow prisoner, tells him he's crazy...

...This, perhaps, is the most interesting mixup of all: For what hope Lina Wertmuller actually does see is really more Christian than political...

...It will never work...

...She is concerned with the man who commits evil because he refuses to say No, the man who —worse than the whores who populate her films—is willing to sell his soul for the sake of his survival...

...But Wertmuller's movies are always more provocative than their manifest content, partly because her sense of humor is so omnivorous (the spokesman for the proletariat in Swept Away is more ridiculous by far than his upper-class "oppressors"), and partly because her films are more energetic and spontaneous, more puzzled and puzzling than an account of their ideology would suggest...

...By the time the whole story is out, Pasqualino has been captured by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp...

...You're neither beautiful nor smart," he tells her...

...And the movie shifts to a prewar Neapolitan burlesque house, where a heaving rump of a woman, sporting a garter with the colors of Italy, sings to a jeering audience...

...In this world, too, sex is seldom more than an act of violence, mirroring the violence in the society at large, and having the unfortunate consequence of breeding more Pas-qualinos...

...It is a typical Wertmuller line (she writes her own screenplays) in its lack of subtlety...

...Yet "the monster of Naples'' is easily caught—and, given the choice by his lawyer between execution and the insane asylum, death or dishonor, he readily chooses dishonor...

...But this passion to live disgusts the Nazi, with her dream of a master race...

...We digest everything," someone laconically remarks...

...In All Screwed Up Adelina tells her lover that they can't afford to get married—there are too many things he doesn't know he needs, like a leather bag and artificial flowers...

...Pasqualino survives...

...The camera closes in: They are wearing white because they have been stripped to their underwear in preparation for a Nazi firing squad...

...Toward the end of All Screwed Up a terrorist bomb explodes just outside an enormous restaurant...

...Pasqualino corners her backstage...

...Deciding he has got to escape, he recalls his sexual conquests in Naples and his mother's telling him that all women need love...

...I've got seven sisters and I've got to defend my honor...

...On Screen WERTMULLER'S CHRISTIAN VISION BY MARCIA CAVELL AUFHAUSER Moviemakers in the '70s seem to be in the same boat as everybody else: They have a lot of fancy technology, but no vision worthy of it...

...The scene in which Pasqualino makes love to the Commandant would be funny if it weren't such a repellent mockery of sex, and if Pasqualino's initial failure "to perform"—as she puts it—weren't a matter of life and death...

...Swept Away was an indictment of all institutionalized power relations, whether capitalistic or sexist...

...If he doesn't, she will have all the prisoners in his cell killed...

...They are in this deep as the Germans, Francesco says...

...Pasqualino and Francesco are appalled...

...But what could they have done, Pasqualino answers...

...The movie opens with black-and-white newsreel shots of World War II, bombs and bombast against a rock music score...

...The film presents us with two species of inhumanity: Pasqualino (Gianearlo Giannini), the contented mediocrity, who takes life as it comes, doesn't bother about politics and cares passionately about his own survival, at any price...

...The movie pieces this story together very slowly as it jumps back and forth from Pasqualino's efforts to survive in a period of relative peace to his efforts during the War...

...I killed before the War," he says, "for a woman...

...First you eat, then you fuck," she orders...

...To dispose of Totonno's corpse, Pasqualino chops it up, stuffs the parts into suitcases and ships them around Italy...