Word: sica
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Throughout the film. Powell describes the injustice of a system which permits the callous extravagance of the society families he serves as butler, yet when the smoke clears the flowing champagne on Sulton Place drowns the social' criticism which gave the film its force. In the late Vittorio De Sica's final film. A Brief Vacation, we experience a similar tantalizing disappointment, as the director offers sentimental solutions which fail to engage the problems he presents so sharply, the complex plight of working women...
...despite her illness, Clara realizes that if she doesn't look after her needs no one else will and goes off to the mountains in the face of her family's adamant disapproval. The sanitorium itself is a welfare state Magic Mountain, set in Alpine grandeur that enables De Sica to display the saccharine cinematography that made his Garden of the Finzi Contins such a visually attractive but intellectually vapid film Snow capped mountains, exquisitely dressed women, luxurious but tasteful architecture and rustic charm proclaim heavyhandedly that we have entered another world totally alien to Clara's seedy three room...
...take seriously, however, when none of the characters avoids two-dimensional typicality. Clara, particularly, as the martyred Working Woman, displays ludicrous malleability in her metamorphosis from Cinderella to Princess at the caprice of the plot. All the romantic music, charming mountain cafes, melting glances and scenic forest idylls De Sica produces cannot lend authenticity to this melodrama, so that the inevitable denouncement is devoid of pathos...
...skilled. Northern Italian, and sexless. Clara has merely exchanged docile acceptance of her place in the home for the equally passive but more glamorous image of middle-class femininity, hoping to pick up dignity and culture with the furs and cosmetics she acquires from her new friends. Here De Sica's uncritical portrait of Clara's new consciousness falsifies the very concern for working women's problems that animates the film, much as the finale in My Man Godfrey negates Powell's indignation at the rich and powerful. For us the tragedy lies not in Clara's failure to escape...
Ophuls's The Earrings of Madams de.... with Darrioux, Charles Boyer and Victoria de Sica, plus a Chaplin short, Sunday, March...