Word: finzi
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...took even less courage to make his latest movie, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a film about the repression of Italian Jews prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Although a fine study in nostalgia, its import lies rather in having created an elegant and moving recapitulation of this shameful episode in Italy's history--thirty years too late. Painful though it may be for a man like De Sica to shoulder the burden of his country's guilt in making such an apology, the balance against sentimental but ineffective nostalgia is only preserved by the counter...
...wobbly pace produced by riding on two wheels, it is clear, as a sporty group of young people comes swooping by in the opening shot, that De Sica is dealing here with the upper-classes, not the population of Rome's slums. Upon the invitation of the Jewish-aristocrat Finzi-Continis, they are on their way to play tennis on the courts in the family's garden. As they pedal through the gates they leave the real world behind. True to the De Sica tradition, the action for the most part takes place apart from developments like war outside...
...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...
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...
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...