Synopsis
Seven Beauties (Pasqualino Settebellezze, 1975) is Lina Wertmüller's Italian tragicomedy, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Giancarlo Giannini stars as a small-time Naples crook nicknamed "Seven Beauties," a jab at the seven plain sisters whose honour he loudly swears to defend.
The film cuts between two timelines. In pre-war Naples, the strutting, vain Pasqualino gets tangled in a killing, fakes insanity, lands in an asylum and then in uniform. The second strand drops him in a German concentration camp after he deserts the eastern front, and there every ounce of his swagger is stripped away. To see another sunrise he sets out to seduce the camp's heavyset female commandant — and the laughter curdles into something far harder to swallow.
His one creed is survival at any price, and the picture is pitiless about what that price does to a man. The work made Wertmüller the first woman ever named in the Oscar directing race, with Giannini cited for lead actor the same year. It's abrasive, deeply uncomfortable cinema, no easy night in. For viewers ready to sit with pitch-black satire about staying alive. Stream Seven Beauties (1975) online on iFILM.
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