Word: sica
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LOOKING BACK OVER Vittorio De Sica's career is to uncover a list of contradictions; a brave man and great filmmaker, or a genius at political compromise and a mediocre director, even a matinee idol or consummate actor. During the post-World War II decade in a battered, guiltridden Italy, he was in the vanguard of the New Realism, and thereby a prominent figure under attack by his country's outraged government, clergy and film critics. In critical circles outside Italy, his cinematic results were considered brilliant (Shoeshine, 1946; Bicycle Thief, 1948; Umberto D, 1950); the ensuing wrath he incurred...
...Sica could also make less promising films. During the later 50's and 60's his art degenerated into trite moralistic statements that crossed the fine line between his somberly human neo-Realism and the more impersonal symbolism of documentaries-with-a-message. As for the Liberal Catholic and social critic, his heroic posturing proves something of an over-compensation for the remorse engendered by playing a confidence game of his own during the German Occupation...
...film opens in the dappled light and lingering summer afternoons of their unresolved courtship, and ends in a wartime winter several years later, inside a barren schoolroom crowded with Jews awaiting confinement. In between, De Sica observes the gathering momentum of catastrophe in small, subtle moments: anonymous phone calls during a Passover celebration, a tiny Nazi flag in a newsboy's bike basket...
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...
...Sica and Cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri indulge themselves a little in their constant use of hazy color. It gives the film a patina of sentimentality that is at odds with its controlled drama. De Sica also never makes fully clear what bearing the Giorgio-Micol love story has on the film's central historical tragedy...