Word: garden
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rejected by Micol, he takes refuge both in his work, as well as in his attempt at a physical change of scene by visiting his brother at the politically aware and apprehensive University of Grenoble. No matter. De Sica always keeps his characters emotionally within the confines of the garden. Giorgio cannot avoid the unprecedented implications of his Jewishness. The seemingly petty anti-Semitic restrictions, that initially brought the group together in play, become so pervasive that Giorgio is even prohibited from completing his studies. "I know, I know," he remarks scathingly to the director who tries to apologize...
GIORGIO is not blind to the danger of remaining in such a tarnished paradise, but even the warning signals encountered abroad cannot argue with a set of emotions that are still back in the garden. He must follow the lines of action that form the framework of De Sica's subjectifying microcosm. These lines continue to bind his characters to the dual power of ethnic identity and omnipresent past. His young people run away and return, reject and make up, but the two dominant forces always narrow the scope of De Sica's drama to his claustrophobic universe, by holding...
...Giorgio the struggle to break loose is intense, but his will-power finally breaks down, and late one night he climbs over the garden wall, only to find Micol and his friend Malnate asleep together in the garden-house, where he has 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...
This invasion of the motorcade isn't the first encroachment from the outside upon the world behind the garden walls. Gradually the inhabitants and their guests have become less immune to ugly winds of change. Of the initial white-clad clique, only Alberto continues to wear that color. Confining himself to his bedroom he pines away between four walls, clutching a white bathrobe around him, and transforming his retreat into the sterile whiteness of a sick room, and finally a deathbed. Always a master of gestures. De Sica places Alberto's nervous submission in the clasp of his folded hands...
...Micol. Showing herself as an almost incestuous alter ego to 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...