Lucking Out - James Wolcott [41]
“—the two of them, waiting by the mailbox …”
“… to your review of Seven Beauties by the Italian director Lina Wertmüller, which in its broad, intemperate disregard for the dark comedy that infuses Wertmüller’s vision …”
Not a movie whose mention today lights the black-mass candles of Nazi-kink nostalgia (displaced by Liliana Cavani’s Night Porter, where sadomasochistic decadence was represented by the ravishing desolation of Charlotte Rampling’s Euro-goddess bone structure), Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties was a major honking controversy when it was released in 1975, a black comedy set mostly in a concentration camp where Giancarlo Giannini, to save his cowardly hide, submitted to sex with the obese commandant, played by Shirley Stoler, their coupling filmed as if he were mating with a hippopotamus or elephant, an obdurate, bestial, Diane Arbus bulk. Long before the word “transgressive” became a journalistic crutch and Quentin Tarantino a jacked-up marionette, Seven Beauties put viewers’ heads in a thunder-thigh vise. It might have remained a film festival/art-house transient had it not received the grand push by the New York Times (“Seven Beauties is Miss Wertmüller’s King Kong, her Nashville, her 8½, her Navigator, her City Lights”), which awarded special dispensation to any Holocaust-related work, its lead reviewer, Vincent Canby, christening it as “a handbook for survival, a farce, a drama of almost shattering impact.” And the film brandished a feminist sash because it was directed by a woman who, by pulling out this hand grenade and juggling it with such bravura, was making a bid for major-league status in foreign film as a female Fellini. (Fellini himself having gotten a bit run-down and recyclish.) Pauline found Seven Beauties a porky, pretentious wallow, as reflected in the title of her review, “Seven Fatties,” a head that nowadays would have the beleaguered remnants of the copy department fretting that such phrasing might be construed as insensitive, weight-ist. I can almost hear Pauline’s pithy, characteristic response: “Tough.” (Which sometimes, depending on the situation, had a “shit” attached.) It was often what she said when someone expressed queasy apprehension on some point of possible offense, a retort that was made not with anger or defiance but with a snorty impatience for euphemism, false modesty, and weak-kneed equivocation as secondhand mode of shirking the truth, or, worse, killing a joke. Tender feelings were a fraudulent cover for larger failures of nerve. (Pauline agreed with Nabokov’s contention that sentimentality and brutality were the flip sides of a subservient mind.) But with a film such as Seven Beauties, the background shadows of barbed wire and camp barracks made critics pro and con feel compelled to dress their prose in its Sunday best, which Pauline only did when true reverence was due (as, say, whenever the majestic prow of Vanessa Redgrave hove into view), and her pan of Seven Beauties was considered a slap in the face of the more sober-minded symposiasts. It was only after the psychologist and critic Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of Auschwitz whose authority on the subject of the camps was unassailable, published a devastating critique of Seven Beauties in The New Yorker in August of that year that its high-minded defenders lightened up on Pauline, but letters still trickled in, furrowed with disappointment. The backlash over Seven Beauties proved to be light flak compared with the furor over Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, when Pauline was more cautious in her tone and respectful in dissent and fat load of good it did her, what she got in return was the plague, accusations of being a self-hating Jew.
After reading a passage from the duo’s letter citing Günter Grass’s Tin Drum and Jerzy Kosinski’s Painted Bird (“to further my education, I suppose,” Pauline said), she handed me the letter so that I could see for myself the closely packed paragraphs of reasoned dissent demonstrating that Pauline had missed not only the boat on Seven Beauties but the ocean, and the larger lesson of the Holocaust,