Movie · 1975 · Comedy, Drama, War · 1h 56m · R · IT
Curator score: 8.1/10 (18.3K ratings)
Overview
Pasqualino Frafuso, known in Naples as "Pasqualino Seven Beauties" is 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.
Ratings
Curator score: 8.1/10
IMDb: 7.7/10
Letterboxd: 3.98/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 67%
TMDB: 7.5/10
Director
Lina Wertmüller
Production
Medusa Distribuzione
Cast
Giancarlo Giannini, Fernando Rey, Shirley Stoler, Elena Fiore, Roberto Herlitzka, Piero Di Iorio, Enzo Vitale, Ermalinda De Felice, Lucio Amelio, Aldo Valletti, Francesca Marciano, Mario Conti, Barbara Valmorin, Salvatore Emilio, Aristide Caporale, Pasquale Vitiello, Luciano Foti, Veriano Ginesi, Carla Mancini, Ada Pometti
Where to watch
Kino Film Collection
Curator Review
Verdict
A savage, darkly comic anti-fascist satire that turns survival into grotesque performance. Its tonal whiplash and morally repellent protagonist can be challenging, but the film’s visual bravado, political bite, and fearless blend of comedy and horror make it a major work.
Best for
Viewers who like bold, transgressive European cinema
Fans of war films that are also social satire
People interested in films about moral compromise and survival
Audiences open to abrasive black comedy
Skip if
You want a straightforward Holocaust drama
You dislike antiheroes who are deeply unsympathetic
You prefer restrained, realistic tone over theatrical excess
You are sensitive to sexual violence and cruelty
Overview
Seven Beauties is one of those films that seems determined to offend easy expectations at every turn. It begins as a bawdy, picaresque comedy about a swaggering Neapolitan hustler, then drags that same man through war, shame, and the machinery of genocide, using satire to expose how vanity and cowardice survive inside systems of mass cruelty.
Worth noting
Lina Wertmüller’s direction is fierce, expressive, and often startlingly beautiful. She refuses solemnity without ever trivializing horror, which gives the film its strange power: laughter becomes a trapdoor into disgust, and spectacle becomes a way of indicting the audience as much as the characters.
Bottom line
The result is messy in the most purposeful sense. Pasqualino is not a redeemable hero, and the film is not interested in comforting moral lessons. It is interested in survival, humiliation, power, and the grotesque bargains people make when history turns murderous.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Nic (5★) · 687 likes
To all the ones who watched this film, oh yeah!
To the ones who haven't yet had the chance, oh yeah!
To all the ones who will watch it again, oh yeah! oh yeah! oh yeah!
Will Steele (4★) · 249 likes
Giancarlo Giannini’s eyes should have won an Oscar each for their hypotonic conveyance of intermittent terror and subterfuge. Behind those sparkling pearls lies either animalistic instincts or Machiavellian machinations.
Lina Wertmüller understands that there is poetry in such mystery. To set her inscrutable lead against the violent tides of crime and genocide makes for a tempestuous narrative rich with artistry, wit and feeling. Wertmüller not only paints a passionate portrait of moral pestilence, but does so with such vivacious vision as to rival even Fellini himself.
The first film I have seen of hers shall certainly not be my last.
Christina (5★) · 190 likes
my first i-talian film is now my favorite!
seven beauties is lina wertmüller’s picaresque tale, illustrating survival as satire. pasqualino, our low leveled opportunist is a drifting, fabio-type. the only son of seven heavy-set sisters, he assumes the macho role of protecting the family’s honor. his honorable facade comes crashing down when he murders one of the girls’ fiancé-in-waiting/pimp and has to answer to a nazi concentration camp among other forms of character castigation. from there we witness amorality of… more
Josh Lewis (4★) · 180 likes
A womanizing Italian oaf who thinks sex work is the ultimate form humiliating degradation finds himself having to do much worse to survive the rise of fascism in Italy. The style is a really cool mix of barbaric neorealist holocaust drama and a more theatrical, satirical and colorful expressiveness aimed at critiquing institutional cruelty, power/gender dynamics and (in Wertmüller's own words) a "particular petty bourgeois social type.” I could see how some could find some of this troubling and maybe… more A womanizing Italian oaf who thinks sex work is the ultimate form humiliating degradation finds himself having to do much worse to survive the rise of fascism in Italy. The style is a really cool mix of barbaric neorealist holocaust drama and a more theatrical, satirical and colorful expressiveness aimed at critiquing institutional cruelty, power/gender dynamics and (in Wertmüller's own words) a "particular petty bourgeois social type.” I could see how some could find some of this troubling and maybe… more
Sally Jane Black · 154 likes
Neat rows of dirt-caked prisoners, crusted pale grey by time and toil, march into the wide auditorium of the concentration camp, and it is breathtaking how that turns them into stunning scenery. That image alone is an effective indictment of the dehumanizing effects of not just the militaristic, controlling formalism of the totalitarian state but also of anything that might do the same--art, for instance. Hanging on this moment are so many cruelties, injustices, ironies, and critiques that it's a… more Neat rows of dirt-caked prisoners, crusted pale grey by time and toil, march into the wide auditorium of the concentration camp, and it is breathtaking how that turns them into stunning scenery. That image alone is an effective indictment of the dehumanizing effects of not just the militaristic, controlling formalism of the totalitarian state but also of anything that might do the same--art, for instance. Hanging on this moment are so many cruelties, injustices, ironies, and critiques that it's a… more
1970 · Drama, History · 1h 35m · R · Curator 6.3/10 (17.8K ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, fuboTV, MGM Plus, Philo, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
A lyrical, devastating look at fascism’s encroachment on ordinary life, with a tragic historical sweep.