Word: sica
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Similarly, Hollywood films during the Depression present the conflicts that wracked American society but ultimately reaffirm the American Dream. Films such as De Sica's A Brief Vacation and Scorcese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore pose the issues of women's oppression but resolve them romantically. The key to such films' failure to transcend the problems they raise lies in their use of the stereotyped plots and characters of romantic comedy and tragedy. The logic of these genres leads either to a happy ending brought about by Fortune or an unhappy ending brought about by Fate; in either...
...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...
...might expect a woman in her situation to have: the easiest exit from the drudgery and stark misery of factory and tenement is assimilation into the elite through physical beauty and seductive charm, as the heroines of mass culture from Cinderella to Marilyn Monroe have discovered. Had De Sica treated the contradictions in Clara's self-awareness with the sardonic tone whose subtle pinpricks enabled Flaubert to deflate Madame Bovary's romantic illusions. A Brief Vacation might have been a penetrating analysis of the obstacles that inhibit working women's emancipation. Because it founders in its heroine's false consciousness...