Amare Macht Frei

THE AMERICAN film world centered in New York has seized upon a new focus: Italian director Lina Wertmuller. No other recent director has achieved such monumental stature so immediately and so unanimously, with the possible exception of Robert Altman. Critics compare Wertmuller without hesitation to Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni; she is besieged by interviewers; her films are mobbed.

The immediate cause of this enthusiasm is Wertmuller's new film, Seven Beauties, and with ample justification. Seven Beauties stands head and shoulders above Wertmuller's previous work; it is the sort of film that proves conclusively this major director has found her stride. Every aspect of the production, from acting and characterization to her use of color and music, is not only delightful to watch in itself, but also contributes directly to the realization of a coherent vision of undeniable emotional force.

The moment in Seven Beauties which epitomizes this harmony of vision and execution comes precisely when Wertmuller confronts her central theme: the moral and emotional impact of Nazi concentration camps on their victims. When Pasquale (Giancarlo Giannini) and his companion Francesco, deserters from the Italian army, are captured by the Germans and taken to a concentration camp, the greens and browns of the lush German countryside give way abruptly to stark grey and black. The camera pans chains of shell-shocked, pajama-clad prisoners, herded through this labyrinth of death by expressionless guards with drawn sub-machine guns and attack dogs. With Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries punctuating its grisly movements, the camera catches sight of the grotesque forms of the hanged above the melee, pausing to observe the ironic inscription from Auschwitz which overlooks the courtyard: Arbeiten macht frei. Through this domain of death stalks its mistress, an obese female commandant whose impassive visage makes her the least human element of the picture. The tableau brings to mind Dante's Inferno as Goya or Bosch might have rendered it, but without any air of conscious imitation.

But Wertmuller is not content to delineate the objective aspects of the camps, however horrifying these might be; what concerns her is their subjective side, the meaning of the ordeal for those who experienced it. Thus, the camera returns to Pasquale after its sweep of the camp. Because we know Pasquale after its sweep of the camp. Because we know Pasquale after its sweep of the camp. Because we know Pasquale and are aware that his arrival in the camps hinged on a series of accidents, his look of terror and disbelief forces us to view the holocaust afresh. After thirty years of cultural bombardment by images of Nazi atrocities, that a director should be able to make even the hardened viewer consider their enormity, as if for the first time, is a remarkable achievement.

IN FACT, this grand tableau is only the beginning of Wertmuller's investigation. Seven Beauties is a film about choices, choices exercised within a situation whose constraints are stark to the point of absoluteness. In effect, Pasquale and the other inmates must choose either to do whatever may be necessary to survive, however vile, or be willing to die. Pasquale's character is defined by his acceptance of this choice, by his willingness to do anything in order to live. As a low level Mafioso in pre-war Naples, known as Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties) because of his inexplicable success with women despite his unattractiveness, he kills the local pimp who has corrupted his less than pristine sister, in the defense of family honor. Having failed to dispose of the body undetected, Pasqualino must choose between honor and survival; animated by his will to live, he pleads insanity. Ultimately, his desire to reenter the world he left behind drives him from the asylum to the army, and thence to desertion and the camps.

Confronted with the death camps, Pasqualino's thirst for life provokes him to invent a plan which represents the complete abandonment of dignity in the name of survival; he will seduce the commandant (Shirley Stoller) in order to eat. In a series of pathetic but comic scenes which show that Pasqualino's mad scheme derives as much from his vanity as from his desperation, he attempts to bring his Neapolitan charm to bear on the ogress, despite the ravages his misfortunes have wreaked on his appearance. Whistling, winking, and blowing kisses as if he were on an Italian street corner, Pasqualino hums a southern love song as he adjusts his striped prisoner's cap to a rakish angle above his sunken cheeks, hoping to entice a woman whose outstretched whip and frozen gaze make her a figure only slightly more approachable than Hitler himself.

When the commandant accepts his attentions despite her understanding of his motives, Pasqualino struggles to perform, though he is half-dead with hunger and sickened by the sight of her. Eventually, Pasqualino's will to live prevails; once fed he achieves his erection against all obstacles, prompting the disgusted commandant to lament that sub-human worms like him without ideals or ideas will survive while the master race collapses. Of course, survival requires not only self-betrayal, but betrayal of others as well. Having become a collaborator, Pasqualino is forced to select others to be killed, and finally, in the climactic sequence, to shoot his friend Francesco, who has chosen to die rather than continue to Francesco, who has chosen to die rather than continue to live in a situation which extinguishes all human values.

Wertmuller reveals Pasqualino's history through a series of flashbacks which represent his reflections in the camp. To sustain his struggle for survival, Pasqualino draws on the experiences of his pre-war life, from his first romance to his mother's advice. this intercutting of past and present constantly reminds us that Pasqualino is making decisions, he is consciously choosing his actions rather than simply following the exigencies of the situation. Through this device, Wertmuller shows that those actions of Pasqualino's which appear to represent the most radical surrender of self-hood are animated by his desperate desire to preserve that self. Because Wertmuller focuses so intensely on the subjective character of Pasqualino's choices and presents him through the extraordinary comic talents of Giannini, she demands that we understand him as a person, and ultimately that we identify with and accept his decisions.

Unlike Louis Malle in Lacombe, Lucien, Wertmuller does not minimize the implications of the collaboration. Instead she demonstrates the consequences of valuing survival above all else, that there can then be no limits to what a man can be driven to do. With a direct and ruthless eye, Wertmuller illustrates what of horrors this involves, forcing us to experience for ourselves what it would be like to face these consequences.

WHILE SEVEN BEAUTIES does not say directly that survival through collaboration and murder is preferable to death in defense of human values, the whole emotional thrust of the film implies that conclusion. Certainly, Wertmuller presents the opposing case, but whenever characters speak against Pasqualino's point of view, they do so in abstract rhetorical terms without a context that could lend any human meaning to their arguments. When Pasqualino and Francesco argues that the two of them are as guilty as the Germans since they are doing nothing to prevent it. But this is simply an inauthentic rendition of stock anti-collaborationist arguments, which makes no sense in the situation since they are unarmed and could do nothing in any case.

In the camps, Wertmuller does portray alternative choices to those of Pasqualino in more fully rounded terms. The situation there is awful enough to make total refusal intelligible, and the character of the old anarchist (Fernando Rey), who continues to affirm his ideal of "man' in disorder" despite a set of crushed testicles, is a touching vignette. Nevertheless, the deaths of Francesco and the anarchist in defiance of the Nazis represent a purely negative gesture. Their renunciation of life based on abstract principles have little to do with the way men lead their lives; collective suicide is simply not a viable moral option. If Wertmuller had wanted to consider serious moral alternatives to collaboration she should have presented a more organized resistance movement such as existed in some of the concentration camps. But the cursory romantic sympathy with which Wertmuller approaches their deaths cannot begin to counterbalance the massive effort she has undertaken to understand Pasqualino sympathetically.

Wertmuller's inability to represent political choices in a meaningful way reflects the violently anti-political thrust of her work. In each of her films, political principles are beliefs that characters adhere to abstractly, and which bear no relation to their lives. In fact, as her films unfold it becomes apparent that the characters' political principles are in conflict with their lifestyles; when they discover this contradiction, they abandon politics for the things that really make Wertmuller's universe revole; sex, emotions, and material ambition.

SINCE WERTMULLER sees politics purely as principles cut off from life, she can envision no way for people to chance the social conditions that structure their lives. Those conditions are thrust upon people by external forces entirely beyond their control, and for Wertmuller they can only choose how to submit to the situations that confront them pre-formed. Seven Beauties opens with black and white montage of World War II newsreels, clips of Hitler and bombings, which eventually leads into the wreck that allows Pasqualino to desert the troop train and plunges him into the Nazi inferno. The social conditions constraining the characters' action stand outside the narrative itself, temporally distant, colored differently, and represented impersonally. Only when the situation is fully formed and unchangeable can Wertmuller abandon this abstract style to focus on her characters, who naturally must either accept or reject the dictates of circumstances.

From this perspective, it is easy to see why Pasqualino appeals to Wertmuller. If men cannot change the world, though it is a terrible place, then they must do what is necessary to survive, since there is no alternative other than death in the name of abstract principles. Given this tragic condition, the only attribute Wertmuller as an observer can take is that of ironic contemplation, exercising a comic acceptance of all the absurdities of human life. It is this fundamental pessimism in Wertmuller's world view which accounts for the coexistent strains of tragedy and comedy i her films.

It may seem ironic that a director who claims politics as her central concern should be so violently antipolitical at the core, and that the most successful leftist director of recent years should turn out to be a stoic in disguise. But in fact, this paradox accounts for much of her success. But in fact, this paradox accounts for much of her success. Her audience understands the message of her films better than she seems to herself; that message speaks to popular if sinister themes of the seventies, legitimating the pursuit of private pleasure and ambition in the name of the impossibility of meaningful social change. But whatever one may think of Wertmuller's vision as a view of the world, it is nonetheless sufficiently complex and coherent to deserve serious attention. Seven Beauties is the most uncompromising embodiment of Wertmuller's vision so far; the intensity and cinematic brilliance of its execution make the film aesthetically exciting and emotionally powerful from any standpoint.