Seven Beauties

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🎙️ EPISODE 699: 04.17.23 I can't recall being so frustrated by a movie's tone. There's nothing inherently awful about any of Seven Beauties (also known as "Pasqualino Sevenbeauties"), an Italian WWII-adjacent film, notable for the fact that its director Lina Wertmüller was the first female to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. The amazingly named Giancarlo Giannini is really good in the lead in the role and some of the larger scale concentration camp set-pieces were very nice visually. But I could not get a handle on whether or not it was trying to be humorous or serious and when; that shit flew right over my head.

And Giannini as Pasqualino can't even be called an antihero; he's just a vile dude who murders someone and hacks up their body, and rapes a physically restrained mental hospital patient. You feel nothing but hate for this guy — and maybe that's the point — but it's not exactly the best way to draw in an audience. Still, as far as TRUE RANDOM selections go, this one is a success. I'll take an inscrutable and/or challenging flick over a straight-up boring one any day.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 698 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 700 ⫸

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Seven Beauties (Italian: Pasqualino Settebellezze, "Pasqualino Sevenbeauties") is a 1975 Italian language film written and directed by Lina Wertmüller and starring Giancarlo Giannini, Fernando Rey, and Shirley Stoler. Written by Wertmüller, the film is about an Italian everyman who deserts the army during World War II, is captured by the Germans and sent to a prison camp, where he does anything he can to survive. Through flashbacks, we learn about his seven unattractive sisters, his accidental murder of one sister's lover, his imprisonment in an insane asylum—where he rapes a patient—and his volunteering to be a soldier to escape confinement. For her work on the film, Wertmüller became the first woman nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. The film received three other Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Foreign Language Film. It also received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Foreign Film It was released on May 4, 1975.