Garden of the Finzi-Continis

I don't have to tell you what is going to happen in a film about Jewish Heroes when the Nazis are coming, you already know. Our hero loses his girl to the communist and then eventually to the holocaust. It would certainly register as one of the biggest coming of age bummers, and yet it didn't ruin the film. It somehow gave these lives even more importance.


Classic Film, Great Director, Great Cast, Great Story   September 24, 2003
Bruce Kendall (Southern Pines, NC)
Thank you Independent Film Channel for sending this one along just when I most needed a palate cleanser after suffering through CENTRAL STATION. It served as the perfect antidote to that bit of system churning mess. If you want to see a director in action who can actually get performers to "put out," and actually act their ###es off, try queueing this one up in your DVD player some evening.

Dominique Sanda earned her reputation off this film. She is the quintissentially complex heroine of the piece. Is she frigid, incestous, frightened, unable to love, passive-aggressive, or something else? We'll never know, but we will always wonder, thanks to fine script-writing, acting and directing. This is old school De Sica surehandedness at play in the fields of the lord here. Rent or buy this. It will never grow old, as it is a true classic.

BEK


A Haunting Tale of Lost Love and Liberty   August 1, 2002
L. J Nary (Indio, CA United States)
This movie is just so beautifully done. It is not a hard or complicated plot to grasp but it is filmed with such, emotion. The visual style, the long moments of nature mixed with youth and fear of the upcoming future. This is the time of Fascism and the rich Jewish families are the next on the list to be sent to concentration camps. The most wealthy family in the town of Ferrara, Italy isolates with their friends, staying inside their garden. No more clubs, tennis matches, or balls, if anything is done it is done on their property with the people they chose to associate with. The love story is between Michol and Giorgio, childhood friends who never got any further than long wishful gazes. Michol finds that Giorgio is someone she loves more as a friend than a lover, Giorgio loves Michol so much and wants her to be his wife. He has a difficult time accepting Michol's decision and this is all wrapped around the dark and dreary time of Fascism. The garden symbolizes the past and the way of life that had once been. The story is about loss, loss of the life that the people in Ferrara once had and the loss of childhood love and the innocence that went with it. The camera work is just breathtaking as well as thought provoking.

Lisa Nary


A BITTERSWEET AND TRAGIC COMING OF AGE FILM...   July 19, 2002
Lawyeraau (Balmoral Castle)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This film, which won an Academy Award for best Foreign Language Picture in 1971, is set in Ferrara, Italy. It begins in 1938 and focuses on the aristocratic jewish family, the Finzi-Continis, in particular, the progeny of that family, Micol (Dominique Sanda) and Alberto (Helmut Berger). These privileged two live in elegant splendor with their family, removed from the harshness of life outside the walls of their lushly beautiful estate, where the fascist regime of Il Duce is beginning its hellish collaboration with Hitler.

The Finzi-Continis family, secular jews at best, shut out the outside world, esconcing themselves amidst the trappings of wealth and privilege, cocooned in their idyllic estate, as if their wealth and position would hold the hostile world at bay. It is as if they believed that the hostility against Italian Jews would not directly touch them. Micol and Alberto even have Aryan good looks. So, what could go wrong?

Their childhood friend, Giorgio, however, is having a different experience. From a middle class, jewish family, he is more in touch with reality and is feeling the impact of virulent anti-semitism, as he finds himself ousted from the university and its library, on the brink of completing his university degree. His brother has left for Switzerland. His father is in denial, thinking that he should not worry about the small things, and that this is all a tempest in a teapot. He is hanging his hat on the premise that he is, after all, an Italian citizen.

As their world begins to crumble all around them, Giorgio tries to kindle a flame between himself and Micol, whom he has loved since childhood, but his love for her remains unrequited. She seems unable and unwilling to vest her emotions in a romance that is destined to be doomed, as the fates conspire to bring them to the same end that jews throughout Europe were meeting. It is this dance of love between them that anchors the movie, however, while the war plays itself out in the background. There comes a point, however, when even the Finzi-Continis are confronted with a reality far harsher than that which they had ever imagined.

The movie plays out the dichotomy of life found outside the walls of the gardens of the Finzi-Continis and that which is set within their beautiful and lush estate. Against a backdrop of Hitler worship and the fascist dictates of Mussolini, largely shown through newsreel footage, the film shows the positions that ordinary italian citizens took when confronted with the dictates of the racial laws that were imposed against the jews. Some went along willingly, carrying out its dictates, while others tried to help where and when they could. The war against the jews is finally brought right to the doorstep of the home of the Finzi-Continis, until it, too, crosses the threshhold and cruelly invades its idyllic environs.

This film is not an action movie but a slow, occassionally ponderous, film, providing much food for thought. Replete with symbolism, it is merely a peek into the lives of a small group of people. It is about how they dealt with living their lives in the shadow of the final solution, as the world that they knew radically changed, destroying their dreams. It is a harsh coming of age movie and not a film that everyone will enjoy. I found myself curiously twixt and tween in terms of how I felt about this somber film, accounting for the three star rating that I accorded it.

The DVD offers next to nothing by way of special features. It contains a brief filmography of some of the actors and not much else. This Italian language film has been remastered, and the subtitles are yellow, which provides more clarity and, consequently, makes for easier reading.


Best Foreign Film 1970   January 9, 2002
Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States)
What makes the film so memorable is its almost dreamlike atmosphere. The Finzi-Contini's garden is a many acred forest replete with wooded paths and tennis court where time seems to stand still as in an Italian pastoral painting. The family is wealthy and influential and so though Jewish remains at a comfortable remove from those events effecting most Italian Jews. The children of the Finzi-Continis are the effeminate, withdrawn and sickly Alberto and the beautiful and artistic and tempermental but emotionally cold Micol(Dominique Sanda). Micol seems to intuit the coming events before they happen and that explains why she refuses any intimate connection. Her love from youth is Grigorio but she wants nothing to do with real emotions from which she knows nothing can come. over Grigorio she chooses intimacies that demand nothing from her emotionally. In one particularly poignant scene Grigorio spies her through a window after she has been making love and she aware of his gaze shamelessly refuses to try and hide the fact as if conveying to him their mutual sense of helplessness. Micol knows what is to come but powerless to do anything about it she retreats into herself further and further. The garden is equated with Micol, symbolizing her sense of beauty, love of art, and culture itself. The gardens isolated quiet surrounded by walls merely emphasizes Micols passive nature in the face of events that will devestate everything about life that she values. DeSica keeps the pace of his film a deliberately slow one and rarely shows you the events happening outside the small Finzi-Contini circle except in brief glimpses of newsreel footage seen in movie theatres so that when the final events unfold they are all the more shocking even though they have been expected all along. And when the Black Shirts do come round to collect all Jews the Finzi-Continis are dressed and waiting. A very moving film for its subtlely crafted and quiet depiction of civilization being undermined by brutal forces. Dominique Sanda is beautiful and fascinatingly complex. Her scenes reward repeat viewings, she is an actress with an uncommon ability to convey deep stirrings of the soul without words.
Also out in 1970 were Bertolucci's Conformist and Fellinis Satyricon. Viva Italia!