Requiem

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS

Directed by VITTORIO DE SICA Screenplay by UGO PIRRO and VITTORIO BONICELLI

When neorealism was gospel, Vittorio De Sica was one of the evangelical influences in world cinema. Times changed, tastes changed, and De Sica tried to adapt himself to the commercial film. The results were at best fluff (Marriage--Italian Style), more frequently flubs (Woman Times Seven, The Condemned of Altond). Now, after more than a decade of indifferent and impersonal work, De Sica has returned to form. If The Garden of the Finzi-Continis does not fully rival The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D., it is good enough to stand comparison with them.

Garden is a quietly touching, achingly human requiem for the passing of a social order--one of those rare films that can make effective personal drama out of political chaos. Expertly adapted from Giorgio Bassani's autobiographical novel, the story deals with two Jewish families in Ferrara in the late 1930s, when Fascism was cresting all over Italy. The Finzi-Continis are patricians who live in a spacious estate behind high walls, heedless and ever so slightly disdainful of the tide outside that will inexorably engulf them. The other family, never named, is aware of the political upheaval all about them. But they try only to accommodate their comfortable middle-class life to it, not escape it.

Subtle Moments. What binds the second family to the Finzi-Continis, besides Jewishness and passivity, is their son Giorgio's infatuation with young Micol Finzi-Contini. He longs for her as a Fitzgerald hero might long for some always unattainable girl. Micol, who studies Emily Dickinson ("an old maid like me"), keeps Giorgio at a delicate distance, tantalizing him, finally turning him into a voyeur.

The film opens in the dappled light and lingering summer afternoons of their unresolved courtship, and ends in a wartime winter several years later, inside a barren schoolroom crowded with Jews awaiting confinement. In between, De Sica observes the gathering momentum of catastrophe in small, subtle moments: anonymous phone calls during a Passover celebration, a tiny Nazi flag in a newsboy's bike basket.

With a mastery reminiscent of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, De Sica presents the Finzi-Continis in every dimension. Enamored of their elegance, he is also obviously moved by the poignancy of their decline. But he suggests, again like Welles, that they are victims of personal as well as historical corruption An incestuous relationship between Micol and her brother Alberto is hinted at.

De Sica and Cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri indulge themselves a little in their constant use of hazy color. It gives the film a patina of sentimentality that is at odds with its controlled drama. De Sica also never makes fully clear what bearing the Giorgio-Micol love story has on the film's central historical tragedy.

But there is no fault to find with his work with actors. Performances like Lino Capolicchio's as Giorgio and Helmut Berger's as Micol's sickly brother give the film remarkable resonance. As Micol's grandmother, a nonprofessional named Inna Alexeies turns in a superbly moving portrait of old age. As Micol, Dominique Sanda is simply stunning. Seen last year in Bertolucci's splendid The Conformist, she is both an actress of great talent and a woman of nearly impossible beauty.

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