Word: finzi
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...spent so many happy hours, where he has spent so many happy hours. Malnate is drafted soon afterwards and sent off to die in Russia; the police pick up more and more Jews; finally they drive their black limousines over the bicycle paths of the garden of the Finzi-Continis. When they emerge again it is to carry the family to join the other Jewish townspeople in the schoolhouse of Ferrara, the first depot on their train ride to those "hotels in the woods, where instead of giving you a key to your room, they burn a number into your...
...Helmut Berger's Alberto, her cool beauty fails to mask a festering decadence that has been epitomized by Berger's own performances in Visconti's The Damned, and Bertollucci's The Conformist. While society is being corrupted outside the garden, the self-contained life-style perpetuated by the Finzi-Continis on the inside is rotting at the core. Raised as a bluestocking, Micol quips to Giorgio that she's writing her thesis on Emily Dickenson, "a dried-up spinster like me." Minutes later, in giving him a mock botany lesson, she points to a tree she imagines planted by Lucrezia...
Only a stronger force of evil can stay Micol's own process of corruption from within. "The Finzi-Continis are not like us," Giorgio's father pleads with him earlier, "they don't even seem Jewish. That's what attracted you to her; she's so superior." Crouched behind a desk in a classroom crowded with Jews awaiting deportation, Micol is both humbled to the same level of humanity as those around her, and bound up with the fate of her people to an ironically larger degree than farseeing Giorgio, who has escaped from Italy with his mother and sister...
...hands of murderers in Dachau, Auschwitz and Treblinka...," De Sica leaves the scene of Micol's proud resignation to look one last time at the dome of Ferrara's synagogue, the implied emptiness beneath her tiled roofs, and a rusty padlock on the gate to the garden of the Finzi-Continis. With a camera eye that has treated two oranges on the luggage rack of a grimy train compartment with as much artistic respect as the baroque splendor of the castle's interior, De Sica lingers over flowerbeds choked with weeds, the crumbling bricks in a wall, the ramshackle remains...
...OPENED up the garden of the Finzi-Continis for all to see a welter of anti-Semitism, decadence, human weakness and human love; an Italy where never a crucifix is seen, only a Star of David carved into the stone gate-post of a Jewish graveyard, or a Hebrew inscription above the doorway of an elegant townhouse. De Sica finally limits his characters to a world of their own subjectivity, leaving untapped a world beyond the area of Italy and deeper than the physical eye can see. His creative vision is undoubtedly capable of exploring the far reaches of such...