There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of greatness in art: that of transcending previously known boundaries, of defying all norms; and that of perfect taste, of working with exquisite tact within one's limitations. In music, for example, this would be the difference between a Wagner or Mahler on the one hand, and a Fauré or Ravel on the other; in painting, between a Michelangelo or Picasso and a Botticelli or Degas. The artists of pure taste seem, rightly or wrongly, to possess a smaller greatness, though I often prefer them to the other sort. But there exists, fascinatingly, even a rare third kind that combines aspects of the two divergent greatnesses—artists who are, somehow, both big and small, fierce and civilized, beyond taste and yet also, miraculously, tasteful….

Seven Beauties (Pasqualino Settebellezze), the new film by Lina Wertmüller, strikes me as the work of this third kind of artist: one who amazingly blends great force with something that, even if it is not exactly delicacy and finesse, is still a mischievous piquancy, a penetrating slyness that borders on a kind of refinement. If Swept Away marks a considerable step beyond Wertmüller's earlier, very fine films, Seven Beauties is an upward leap in seven-league boots that propels her into the highest regions of cinematic art, into the company of the major directors. (p. 25)

Wertmüller is a master both of camera placement and movement, and of editing, or montage. She would have delighted Bazin as much as Eisenstein….

Faultless, too, is the rhythm with which the film shuttles between Germany and Italy. This always occurs when one story has become unendurable or stalemated, and any change is welcome. Even within individual episodes, though, the sense of contrast is marvelous…. And what of the glory of having the entire trial scene done in pantomime? In a baroque palace of justice, covered with grandiose frescoes, a puny mockery of justice takes place—and trust Wertmüller's camera to discover among the painted figures a bemused ostrich, the symbol of evasion of reality and truth. And what comic puppet's gestures everyone is making (Wertmüller started as a puppeteer), and how they're all gotten up! The ugly sisters have all dyed their hair blond, to convey the golden radiance of angelic purity; only it makes them look even more sluttish. And since people, separated by space, cannot talk to one another, what a veritable ballet of eyes! (p. 26)

Even the music backs up these points. Träume (Dreams), which the half-naked woman at the hunting lodge played in isolated yearning, is taken up again by the commander as she is serviced by Pasqualino. In between, however, when the prisoners are being brutalized in the death camp, we get "The Ride of the Valkyries." Well, those are the two extremes of Wagner's music, or of the Germanic soul: its most voluptuous sentimentality, and its most shrilling violence….

There is more going on in a minute of this film than in an hour of Hustle or Hester Street or Barry Lyndon. By "more" I do not mean plot, of course. I mean things like symbolic geometry, the way the movements of the escaping Italians are opposed in direction and speed across the film frame to those of the Jews being herded to slaughter….

Throughout the film, Miss Wertmüller's view moves in and out of her characters, creating a magnificent contrast between one shot in which things are seen subjectively, grandiosely, by a character, and the next, where they are perceived punily, objectively, by the eye of history. Thus in the brothel confrontation scene between Pasqualino and Totonno, which at one point is like the shootout in some John Ford Western, and at the next like some pratfall in a Germi comedy….

The final sequences are the most moving. The Yankee liberators have made whores of everyone, from Pasqualino's mother down to the pure young girl; the prevailing jollity is as disturbing as it is gaudy. And when the Girl appears in the doorway—bedizened, soiled, ashamed—and still stares with unblemishable love at Pasqualino; and he, remembering uncomprehendingly Pedro's lesson, declares they must get married at once and have 30 children, so that when overpopulation and hunger set in, their family will be able to hang on to those apples, you are left in tears at what, after all, is a kind of happy ending. But oh the sadness of it…. (p. 27)

Just as at the start of the film historic stock footage imperceptibly changed into a personal story to the accompaniment of a satirical Wertmüller lyric worthy of Jacques Prévert, so the freeze frame at the end, showing Pasqualino's face as a compound of anguish and incomprehension, returns us to history, to mankind's danger of being frozen into misconceptions and headed for extinction, for all the shrewdness of dumb survival artists. How many comedies have ever made you cry?

That is the ultimate greatness of Wertmüller and her film—that it transcends all conventional categories. It is neither comedy nor tragedy (its saddest parts are funny; its funniest, heartbreaking), and it makes nonsense of the very need for classification. Above all, perhaps, it is grotesque—like a gargoyle that is ugly, beautiful, frightening, and ludicrous. It is even two entirely different kinds of filmmaking: the Italian scenes are early, prime Fellini; the German sequences are out of those somberly, tearingly sardonic Polish masters, Wajda and Munk. Yet the astonishing thing is that such divergent modes could be made to complement and nourish each other, bodying forth a most ancient wisdom about the ambiguity and self-contractoriness of things. For in this film there is no absolute right, except for the need for creative disorder and the New Man….

Seven Beauties is also a film about the power and duality of love—love of sex, of passion, of survival—that is both bestial and angelic, both giving and selfish, gentle and terrible. (p. 28)