The Governors Awards (Honorary Oscars) will be held on October 27th, 2019 with director Lina Wertmüller, actress Geena Davis, director David Lynch, and actor Wes Studi celebrated. We'll be discussing each of them before then.
by new contributor Camila Henriques
In Seven Beauties, Lina Wertmüller is not interested in sparing the audience. That becomes clear in the first minutes of the film, when we’re presented with a myriad of images of the Second World War: Hitler, explosions, destruction. In the background, a voice over speaks with a hint of melancholy and irony about “the ones who keep going and going just to see how it will end”...
Seven Beauties is a tale about the loss of innocence and morals. It's also a brave take on life during a totalitarian regime - the movie is set during WWII, a time when Italy was commanded by fascist leader Benito Mussolini, whose alliance to Adolf Hitler was one of the decisive factors for the war to explode.
While the post-Second War italian cinema showed the economic and social aftermath in the villages and destroyed cities (think Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica), Wertmüller’s work in the seventies had a mix of political criticism and a more stylized technique (she had previously been an assistant to Federico Fellini). Her actors and camera work were exaggerated and histrionic at times, as opposed to Rossellini and De Sica’s more documentary-like eye. The use of color is another important aspect of her work. Note the green that innebriates the scenery as the lead character suffers physically at the end of Seven Beauties.
The protagonist "Pasqualino Settebelleze" (also the original name of the film), who is played by Wertmüller's frequent collaborator Giancarlo Giannini, is a man caught up in a tangle of memories including a lock-up in a concentration camp after he tries to desert the army.
Wertmüller invites us to Pasqualino’s past, and we discover that he’s not the classic archetype of a hero to root for. He has raped, killed and schemed his way through life. The beauty of the director’s work lies in the fact that she doesn’t wants us to love him right away: he’s a flawed man ironic to the point that his “Seven Beauties” nickname is a way of mocking his seven sisters who are anything but beauties. The film is not interested in becoming another weepy Holocaust drama (cough, ‘Life is Beautiful, cough). In fact, “Seven Beauties” is a raw tale of survival through violence.
The abundance of closeups (trust me, there’s tons of them!) can be a turnoff, but, this choice definitely helps Giancarlo Giannini's poignant performance -- his face is truly the center. The pain, fear and anger displayed are not nuanced but the stylized exaggeration fits the narrative. He ended up nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, but lost out to Peter Finch, whose performance in Network is of the same cloth, far from understated and using histrionics to potent effect.
Speaking of Oscar, Seven Beauties put Lina Wertmüller in the history books as she became the first (of only 5) women to be nominated for Best Director. At that time, Oscar was almost 50 years old, and greats like Agnes Varda, Ida Lupino, Dorothy Arzner and Elaine May had been snubbed in favor of a some lesser male colleagues - Varda did get an Honorary Oscar and a subsequent nomination for Faces/Places a couple of years ago (after decades of working steadily), but inexplicably lost to a 60 Minutes kind of documentary.
It’s interesting to ponder what made the Academy fall in love with Wertmüller. They'd previously been blind to female directors and her film doesn’t fit the mold of other foreign masterpieces that were recognized through the years. Even though her Fellini roots show, as a director she clearly followed her own path.
When Seven Beauties came out, American film critics and, as a consequence, the Academy, were in the middle of their love affair with the progressive, violent and character driven films made by the New Hollywood gang. Seven Beauties fits the mold in that sense, but there was also the bandwagon + goodwill factor: before this 1975 film, Lina had already a couple of NYFCC mentions for Swept Away, one the most famous titles in her filmography. In an expanded best picture scenario, it wouldn’t be so crazy to think Seven Beauties could have gotten a nod there. After all, it was nominated for best Director, Actor, Screenplay (another one for Wertmüller) and Foreign Film, where it ended up losing to Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Black and White in Color.
As Wertmüller cleans up the lenses of her iconic white glasses to accept her long overdue Honorary Oscar, it’s a fact that her place in history goes beyond that nomination in 1976. She was fully in command of her own voice as a storyteller and didn’t shy away from difficult and discomforting narratives.