Word: sica
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...directors find her aura of mystery the clue to her appeal. Vittorio De Sica, who worked with her in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, says that she must play characters who are not obvious, women who do not express what is inside. "With Dominique," he observes, "one must scrutinize, one must search out what she sincerely thinks and feels. It is all closed inside." In the moody, half-toned study of an aristocratic Jewish family in Fascist Italy, Dominique played the sheltered, unworldly daughter. In The Conformist, another brilliant film about the same era, she was the lesbian wife...
...that her lover, French Actor-Director Christian Marquand, calls her essential quality. "She's slightly schizophrenic," says Marquand, "and that gives her a great gift of poetry and a natural perception of things." Some observers wonder, however, if she can act in a wider variety of parts. De Sica seems not to be one of the doubters; he sees her liabilities more as a factor of age than temperament. "Una bambino." he says of the Dominique he directed, "with all the qualities and all the defects of the very young...
Biton and his pal Bob (Cliff Potts) steal $250,000 from one of the resorts and stash it in a snow-covered cranny. They plan to retrieve it in the spring when the snow melts. But an insurance investigator (Vittorio De Sica) comes around and endangers the whole operation. De Sica spends most of his time wagging his finger and laughing uproariously, for reasons that remain unfathomable...
...Sica's realistically monotonous speed of progression is his film guides the action slowly 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...
...welter of anti-Semitism, decadence, human weakness and human love; an Italy where never a crucifix is seen, only a Star of David carved into the stone gate-post of a Jewish graveyard, or a Hebrew inscription above the doorway of an elegant townhouse. De Sica finally limits his characters to a world of their own subjectivity, leaving untapped a world beyond the area of Italy and deeper than the physical eye can see. His creative vision is undoubtedly capable of exploring the far reaches of such worlds, but in the Garden of the Finzi-Continis it tends to pirouette...