Customer Reviews

The Garden Of The Finzi Continis

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" (1970)--based on the autobiographical novel by Giorgio Bassani--legendary Neorealist filmmaker, Vittorio de Sica, dramatizes the human cost of the "racial laws" gradually implemented against the Jews in Fascist Italy during the years 1938-43. The more Bassani's young middle-class Jewish protagonist feels the brunt of Mussolini's anti-Semitic edicts encroaching upon him, the more he feels drawn to the aristocratic Jewish Finzi-Continis' estate--their Edenic "garden"--and to Micòl, the family's beautiful young daughter. Psychologically, this compulsion seems to stem from a deep emotional attachment to a perpetually innocent, untroubled state of childhood, which both Micòl and her garden seem to represent. Throughout the film, there is a marked conflict between childhood and adulthood, between the distant past and the immediate present, between the act of retreating into a world of comfortable illusions and confronting a world of harsh and bitter realities.

I found this particular aspect of the story very fascinating, although too tantalizingly obscure and open-ended--and thus, not quite as illuminating or fulfilling as it might have been were it more clearly explained. (This could the reason why some people find the film--and its heavily symbolic, impressionistic style--a little confusing and underwhelming.)

For Giorgio--both the naive hero and wisened author of the story--Micòl embodies the mystery and allure of the Finzi-Continis, as well as their insularity and their apparent passivity in the face of the escalating Fascist crackdown. She always appears distant and unattainable, with no obvious reasons for her actions, and never really provides a direct, comprehensible explanation for her insistent rejection of Giorgio or for what appears to be a subtle streak of cruelty towards him. Her conversation with him always seems deliberately vague, and her refusal to make any further connection with him has a curious, almost perverse kind of fatalism about it.

Again, this is another feature of the film that is certainly intriguing--and strangely seductive-- but, alas, never quite pays off enough to become fully understandable to either the protagonist or the audience.

When the Fascists finally do arrest the Finzi-Continis and confiscate their estate it comes as something of a surprise. The muted and deliberately spare representation of these characters and their feelings, as evidenced in their unusually restrained behavior, is meant to isolate and heighten the impact of a few devastating strokes of sudden realization and lucidity--pointed indications that the protective spell of the Finzi-Continis has been finally broken.

All in all, well-acted and gorgeously, languidly poetic in its imagery...yet, narrative-wise, the picture seems overly elliptical and ultimately opaque--and leaves just a few too many rough fragments and loose ends lingering at the end of the story (not quite Proustian irony, maybe?). In spite of this peculiar drawback, the film finishes very effectively, and by the final desolate shots, you are left with an unexpectedly intense feeling of loss and anguish.

"The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" is a very unusual and interesting (and thankfully, non-sentimental and non-self-important) addition to the ever-expanding canon of dramatic films about life in the shadow of the Holocaust.

Good show. I give this one four out of five stars.

What makes the film so memorable is its almost dreamlike atmosphere. The Finzi-Contini's garden is a many acred forest replete with wooded paths and tennis court where time seems to stand still as in an Italian pastoral painting. The family is wealthy and influential and so though Jewish remains at a comfortable remove from those events effecting most Italian Jews. The children of the Finzi-Continis are the effeminate, withdrawn and sickly Alberto and the beautiful and artistic and tempermental but emotionally cold Micol(Dominique Sanda). Micol seems to intuit the coming events before they happen and that explains why she refuses any intimate connection. Her love from youth is Grigorio but she wants nothing to do with real emotions from which she knows nothing can come. over Grigorio she chooses intimacies that demand nothing from her emotionally. In one particularly poignant scene Grigorio spies her through a window after she has been making love and she aware of his gaze shamelessly refuses to try and hide the fact as if conveying to him their mutual sense of helplessness. Micol knows what is to come but powerless to do anything about it she retreats into herself further and further. The garden is equated with Micol, symbolizing her sense of beauty, love of art, and culture itself. The gardens isolated quiet surrounded by walls merely emphasizes Micols passive nature in the face of events that will devestate everything about life that she values. DeSica keeps the pace of his film a deliberately slow one and rarely shows you the events happening outside the small Finzi-Contini circle except in brief glimpses of newsreel footage seen in movie theatres so that when the final events unfold they are all the more shocking even though they have been expected all along. And when the Black Shirts do come round to collect all Jews the Finzi-Continis are dressed and waiting. A very moving film for its subtlely crafted and quiet depiction of civilization being undermined by brutal forces. Dominique Sanda is beautiful and fascinatingly complex. Her scenes reward repeat viewings, she is an actress with an uncommon ability to convey deep stirrings of the soul without words.
Also out in 1970 were Bertolucci's Conformist and Fellinis Satyricon. Viva Italia!

This film, which won an Academy Award for best Foreign Language Picture in 1971, is set in Ferrara, Italy. It begins in 1938 and focuses on the aristocratic jewish family, the Finzi-Continis, in particular, the progeny of that family, Micol (Dominique Sanda) and Alberto (Helmut Berger). These privileged two live in elegant splendor with their family, removed from the harshness of life outside the walls of their lushly beautiful estate, where the fascist regime of Il Duce is beginning its hellish collaboration with Hitler.

The Finzi-Continis family, secular jews at best, shut out the outside world, esconcing themselves amidst the trappings of wealth and privilege, cocooned in their idyllic estate, as if their wealth and position would hold the hostile world at bay. It is as if they believed that the hostility against Italian Jews would not directly touch them. Micol and Alberto even have Aryan good looks. So, what could go wrong?

Their childhood friend, Giorgio, however, is having a different experience. From a middle class, jewish family, he is more in touch with reality and is feeling the impact of virulent anti-semitism, as he finds himself ousted from the university and its library, on the brink of completing his university degree. His brother has left for Switzerland. His father is in denial, thinking that he should not worry about the small things, and that this is all a tempest in a teapot. He is hanging his hat on the premise that he is, after all, an Italian citizen.

As their world begins to crumble all around them, Giorgio tries to kindle a flame between himself and Micol, whom he has loved since childhood, but his love for her remains unrequited. She seems unable and unwilling to vest her emotions in a romance that is destined to be doomed, as the fates conspire to bring them to the same end that jews throughout Europe were meeting. It is this dance of love between them that anchors the movie, however, while the war plays itself out in the background. There comes a point, however, when even the Finzi-Continis are confronted with a reality far harsher than that which they had ever imagined.

The movie plays out the dichotomy of life found outside the walls of the gardens of the Finzi-Continis and that which is set within their beautiful and lush estate. Against a backdrop of Hitler worship and the fascist dictates of Mussolini, largely shown through newsreel footage, the film shows the positions that ordinary italian citizens took when confronted with the dictates of the racial laws that were imposed against the jews. Some went along willingly, carrying out its dictates, while others tried to help where and when they could. The war against the jews is finally brought right to the doorstep of the home of the Finzi-Continis, until it, too, crosses the threshhold and cruelly invades its idyllic environs.

This film is not an action movie but a slow, occassionally ponderous, film, providing much food for thought. Replete with symbolism, it is merely a peek into the lives of a small group of people. It is about how they dealt with living their lives in the shadow of the final solution, as the world that they knew radically changed, destroying their dreams. It is a harsh coming of age movie and not a film that everyone will enjoy. I found myself curiously twixt and tween in terms of how I felt about this somber film, accounting for the three star rating that I accorded it.

The DVD offers next to nothing by way of special features. It contains a brief filmography of some of the actors and not much else. This Italian language film has been remastered, and the subtitles are yellow, which provides more clarity and, consequently, makes for easier reading.

This is a deep and lyrical film on the Italian brand of fascism, which many have argued was a "lighter" and more acceptable version than the Hitlerian variety. Well, in this film, what that translates into is that the noose tightens more slowly. In this, you witness gifted and lucky youth, as they attempt to cope with and then shut out what is happening outside the confines of the walls of their property. There are the aristocratic and beautiful Finzi-Continis and their poorer Jewish confreres. Of course, there is also a wonderfully sensitive story of young love, with all the seemingly endless pain that can entail, which sets a backdrop to the dangers that they all face. The fascists are still brutes, but in Italy they know how to smile before slashing when the time is right for them.

The film also takes place in Ferrara, which for me was fascinating personally. I lived quite near that city, and often went there to stroll with my family. I knew the area well, and this film provides a snapshot of what it was like for many who lived 70 years ago. It was the end of a world, vividly portrayed as lost potential.

This was, I believe, Dominique Sanda's first film. She is less well known in the US because she chose not to come to Hollywood, though she was wooed for years with stardom. Instead, she chose to act in high quality serious films in Europe, which are always a treat to come across. Sanda is a genuine artist. In this film, her acting is flawless and subtle - she is arrogant, sensitive, caring, and spoilt all at the same time and totally believable. The other actors shine less brightly, perhaps, but are still excellent.

Warmly recommended.

How people blind themselves to the reality around them and insulate themselves from the truth. The movie deals with the Fascist takeover of Jewish property and freedoms in Italy during WW II.

The focus is on one Jewish family and their refusal to take seriously what's happening to them by the authorities until it's too late: by movie's end they are stripped of their property and are being readied to be shipped to a concentration camp. Yet they STILL can't see the writing on the wall. Their insular lives are totally consumed with playing tennis and bicycle riding and flirting with one another. (The walled-in garden is a major symbol of their insularity.)

De Sica makes the ending as painful and shocking as possible for the viewer by photographing everything in bright sunshine and pastels. And painful and shocking it is - like watching lambs being sent to their slaughter. An evocative, excellent movie.

In this haunting work by Vittoria De Sica an aristocratic Italian-Jewish family, the Finzi-Continis, serve as a symbol of European civilization in the hands of the fascists on the eve of World War II. Seeing it again after thirty years I find myself saddened almost as much by the story of a stillborn, unrequited love as I am by the horror of the cattle cars to come.

Dominique Sanda with her large, soft eyes is mesmerizing as the beautiful, enigmatic, but icy Micol Finzi-Contini. Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio) is her childhood friend, a boy from a middle-class Jewish family, now grown up. He's in love with her, but her feelings for him are that of a sister. He is confused by her warmth, and then as he tries to get close, her cool rejection.

It has often been expressed metaphorically that Europe in the thirties was raped by fascism. However in this extremely disturbing film, De Sica is saying that it wasn't a rape, that the aristocracy of Europe (here represented by the Finzi-Continis of Ferrara, and in particular by the young and beautiful Micol) was a willing, even an eager, participant in the bestial conjoining.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is far from perfect; some would say it is also far from De Sica's best work. Certainly it comes after his prime. The editing is a little too severe in places, while some of the scenes are too loosely focused. Nonetheless this is an enormously powerful film that finds its climax in one of the most disturbing scenes in all of cinema. There is little point in discussing this film without looking at this scene. Consequently, for those of you who have not seen the film and do not want to risk having it spoiled for you, you should stop reading now and come back afterwards.

Everything in the movie works toward setting up the cabana scene. We see the dog several times, hinting at a crude, animalistic side to Micol. And there is the wall that separates the Finzi-Contini's garden of civilization from the black shirts in the streets, a wall that also separates the rich from other people, particularly from the middle class who support the fascists (as we are told in the opening scene). We see Micol leading Giorgio by the hand about the estate, but always when he tries to caress her, she pulls away. Finally she explains to him why she doesn't love him. She says, "lovers want to overwhelm each other...[but]...we are as alike as two drops of water...how could we overwhelm and want to tear each other...it would be like making love with a brother..." But hearing these words is not enough. Giorgio goes to the wall one last time, sees a red bicycle there (red and black were the colors of the Nazi party) and knows that Micol is with someone else. He climbs the wall and finds the dog outside the cabana so that he knows she is within. In the opening scene she referred to the cabana with the German "Hütte," adding that now "we'll all have to learn German." What he sees when he looks through the window fills him with a kind of stupefying horror, as it does us. Not a word is spoken. He sees her, he sees who she is with and what the circumstances are. She sees him, turns on the light so that there can be no mistake and they stare wordlessly at one another. She projects not shame, but a sense of "This is who I am. I would say I'm sorry, but it wouldn't change anything. This is what I'm drawn to."

What is expressed in this essentially symbolic scene, acted out in sexual terms, is what happened to Europe. Micol is at once the love he wanted so much, deflowered by an anonymous, but clearly fascist man, and she is also the aristocracy of Europe, polluted by fascism.

I wonder if it is just a coincidence that the famous poem by Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess," is also set in Ferrara. In that poem the narrator reveals himself through the unfeeling brutality of his speech and actions to be, although an aristocrat, an incipient fascist. I also wonder if De Sica is saying that the Jews in some sense contributed to the horror that befell them, and by extension, all of humanity. We see this expressed in the person of Giorgio's father who continually insists that it's not that bad yet, as step by step they lose their status as citizens, a prelude to the dehumanization that is the precursor of genocide. Certainly the closing scenes in which the Jews of Italy are seen to be compliant as they are led to the slaughter suggests as much. I know that the central feeling expressed by Jews after the war and especially in Israel was simply, "never again." Nevertheless, there is a certain sense of the inevitable about this film that I find particularly disturbing. Passivity in sexual terms, a "giving in" to one's nature is one thing. A passivity in political terms is quite another, and yet it is part of the power of this film to show us how they are related in our psyches.

They say you can't go back, but sometimes maybe you can. I first saw this in college around thirty years ago, and was knocked out by it's elegaic qualities and the power of the emotions generated as events took their inevitable course. I have always claimed it as one of my favorite films, without ever taking the risk of revisiting it and having my illusions shattered. But finally, flushed with the joys of our new DVD player and theatre sound I took the plunge. What a relief! I might certainly be older, questionably wiser and probabaly more cynical, but I still found myself swept along by the emotions even though there were no surprises to be found.

My partner, though, could not be bothered with the whole thing. And was turned off by having to deal with sub-titles.

The Garden of the Finzi Contini's is not only one of the most
powerful and emotionally touching films ever made, it contains
one of the most powerful, beautiful, and emotionally touching
SOUNDTRACKS ever scored. After seeing this haunting work of
art, I tracked down the Italian import cd soundtrack of the film
after much searching and obtained it. As said before, the film
itself about a WW2 Jewish family that is doomed, is heartbreak-
ing. You know it's coming - when it did, I actually cried it was
so moving. Again, the musical score in this film is nothing short
of brilliant and contributed greatly to the emotional impact of the
story. Not a film for the shallow or simple minded. It's a power-
ful, serious, dramatic work of art that will remain timeless. The
Adam Sandler, "Kill Bill" crowd can kindly stay away from great
cinema like this. Winner of 26 International Awards, including
Best Foreign Language Film - 1971, it's brilliantly directed by
Vittorio De Sica ("The Bicycle Thief"), with the fabulous score
composed by his brother Manuel De Sica, and stars the ravishing
Dominique Sanda as the tragic daughter and love interest Micol,
who, along with the rest of her family, meet their fate at the
hands of WW2 Fascism in Italy. I've seen very few films that
pack the emotional and heartbreaking bang this one does. It's
a masterpiece - every star in the universe for this beautiful
film, along with the incredible and stunning soundtrack.

I love this film because of its mood, it's done in a true De Sica tradition, so even while it deals with a terrible subject of human extermination, it does profess the idea of eternal kindness and good. Perhaps some may find it boring, but in my opinion, it's no more boring than Life is Beautiful or Seven Beauties or myriad of others - it's an italian film and definitely not a Hollywood production.

This is a fascinating and haunting movie. Honestly not very much happens in it: some very very beautiful doomed people fail to notice the walls they have built around themselves are merely illusions that will not protect them. But it is also a brilliant work exposing the complicity of regular people in the holocaust and hauntingly capturing a vanished world. The last scenes have stayed in my head for years. As for the DVD, well, it has no extras, but the movie holds up well.