Word: micol
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Realizing that a relationship between them is impossible, Micol flees the tardy growth of Giorgio's passion by going to Venice to finish her studies. De Sica allows Giorgio similar flirtations with escape, when things start to fall to pieces for him. Repeatedly 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...
...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...
...REAL PROOF of an all--too--worldly' morality lies in Dominique Sanda's 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...
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...
...from full minute to full minute. In a final sequence, however, De Sica rises almost to the surreal. To the swelling of a chanted exhortation to "Pray for all of us who fell at the 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...