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If you have ever wondered just how low a person will sink to stay alive, provides a haunting, darkly comedic answer in her 1975 masterpiece, Seven Beauties (originally Pasqualino Settebellezze ).

It seamlessly blends slapstick comedy with the "absolute lowest depths of human cruelty".

The story follows Pasqualino Frafuso (played with "fearless" intensity by Giancarlo Giannini), a petty Neapolitan thug nicknamed "Seven Beauties" for his seven unattractive sisters. Pasqualino is obsessed with a "macho" concept of family honor. His journey is a series of increasingly desperate choices:

The film’s most famous—and "grotesque"—sequence involves Pasqualino deciding to seduce the camp’s "sadistic" and corpulent female commandant (Shirley Stoler) as his only path to survival. Wertmüller uses this disturbing scenario to strip away Pasqualino’s remaining shreds of dignity, transforming his survival from a "triumph" into a cold, cynical "expression of the life force". Why It Matters: Cinematic History

To avoid prison, he pleads insanity, only to volunteer for the Italian Army to escape the horrors of the psychiatric ward.