Charnel Knowledge

By JAY COCKS

SEVEN BEAUTIES

Directed and Written by UNA WERTMULLER

Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) is a survivor, and Lina Wertmuller's smashing new movie concerns both the ways he stays alive and the price he pays. Seven Beauties is a death-house comedy, brutal, audacious, liberating. As previous films like Love and Anarchy, The Seduction of Mimi and Swept Away demonstrate, Wertmuller takes a ringmaster's glee in barraging an audience with tawdry splendors and keeping it dazzled. She knows how to make us laugh, hard and long, even while we question ourselves for doing it. It is from the persistence of this questioning that Wertmuller gives us the greatest rewards.

Seven Beauties is a knockabout mockery of a cherished notion: that just to go on drawing breath is worth any sacrifice, a goal beyond any scruple. This is certainly an idea to which Pasqualino Frafuso clings with all the fervor in his Neapolitan soul. Nicknamed "Seven Beauties," in ironic allusion to his seven lumpish sisters, Pasqualino struts and flirts for all the women in Naples and looks for "respect" from the local don.

He murders--albeit inadvertently--the man who turned his oldest sister Concettina into a whore, chops the body up and ships it north in three suitcases.

Plea of Insanity. Pasqualino had hoped to impress the don not so much with the crime but with his novel means of corpse disposal. He is undone by a furious, hysterical Concettina (Elena Fiore) and brought to justice. A man of vocal but flexible honor, Pasqualino will not cop a plea of insanity until he understands that the only alternative is the death penalty. With a little help from the don, Pasqualino draws twelve years in an asylum.

He moves, then, from one kind of madness to another. A friendly doctor gets him bounced from the hospital--where, overcome by months of tethered ardor, he tried to rape a woman patient--and into the army. For Pasqualino, the second World War is a survival course which requires all his back-alley resources. He fakes being wounded by stealing the bandages from a dead soldier, thus avoiding assignment to the Russian front. He deserts, gets caught by Nazis and is imprisoned in a concentration camp where dead bodies hang from the ceiling and litter the floor like parched, trampled leaves.

In this charnel house, the kind of madness that Pasqualino perpetrated on a smaller scale becomes massive. To stay alive, Pasqualino must summon up his last reserves of cunning. In one horrible, hilarious sequence, he tries to worm his way into the good graces of the female camp commandant (Shirley Stoler) by making love to her. She is a lesbian leviathan who tolerates his attentions only because of his very desperation. She uses his appetite for life to debase him, and he allows it. He even agrees to preside over the execution of fellow prisoners. All for survival.

The laughter in Seven Beauties has grim echoes, and every scene finds its own refraction, insane but recognizable.

The wholesale slaughter in the concentration camp becomes an awful elaboration of Pasqualino's butchery back in Naples. His squirming on top of the commandant is a punishment and a parody of the asylum rape, as well as of the way Pasqualino would have women back home--usually by force.

Wertmuller fashions the film so that even the paradoxes double back on each other. Pasqualino is a murderer and rap ist. But he is a rogue, too, winning be cause of his shabby, transparent charm.

The ferocity of his life force compels sympathy, but it is the persistence of that very force Wertmuller questions. Seven Beauties suggests that there are prices that must never be met: survival may not be its own justification.

Giancarlo Giannini is the storm center of the movie, and he acts Pasqual ino with sulfurous splendor. Giannini, with eyes of stinging intensity, has been leading man for Wertmuller in all her movies released in America. Like her, Giannini knows how to work right at the taproot of his character. There has been no one quite like him since Mastroianni, but Giannini shows an even wider range, not just of roles, but of spirit.

Image of Horror. The movie is vastly ambitious, but it is also jaunty and diverting. There is time for an affection ate send-up of Bertolucci: Giannini's en trance into a Neapolitan music hall, stupidly splendid with a cigarette holder and snap-brim hat, recalls The Conform ist. There are some good visual puns:

the camp commandant straddling her office chair like a grotesque Dietrich.

Director Wertmuller invests the concentration-camp episodes with a power that reminds us how those images of horror have been turned into familiar cliches. One measure of Wert muller's talents is that she forges all these elements together so easily, probably because she has enjoyed such a varied career. Once an assistant to Fellini, Lina Wertmuller, 45, has directed the ater, mounted musicals, even created a television program of Italian pop tunes.

Traces and refinements of all those influences are still present in her work, but she unites them with carefree ease, as if the connections were there before she made them. Her humor is startling and raucous, but always purposeful. The comedy complements, never contradicts, the brilliant brute force of her movie.

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