Not just the young Finzi-Contis (Dominique Sanda and Helmut Berger), but the other Jewish youth of Ferrara in Vittorio De Sica’s 1970 film of Giorgio Bassani’s novel look as Aryan as photographs of Hitler Youth do. The only dark-haired youth is the somewhat older and Gentile communist, Bruno, played by Fabio Testi (the Italian John Gavin, though slightly less wooden: mix in a dollop of Sean Connery ca. 1960).

Although less than the novel, the film’s perspective is that of Giorgio, played by Lino Capolicchio. Giorgio has been enamored for years with Micol (Dominique Sanda, who also made a splash in 1970 in Bernardo Bertolucci’s more interesting film of Moravia’s novel The Conformist). She is the very blonde, very unobtainable daughter of an extremeley wealthy Jewish family that lives in a palace that is surrounded by a huge (Edenic) garden. With increasing restrictions on what Jews in Italy can do, The Finzi-Contininis do not leave home, apparently feeling that they are safe behind the high walls that surround their estate.

Their great dignity, learning, and riches do not protect them. Giorgio’s father has a much clearer understanding (even than Giorgio) of the dangers to Jews. Giorgio is too smitten by Micol to stay in exile with his brother when he visits him in Grenoble before Italy and France are at war (i.e., some time in 1938 or as late as the summer of 1939). One of the keenest ironies is that we last see Micol in the embrace of Giorgio’s father (Romolo Valli) as the Jews of Ferrara are waiting to be shipped to concentration camps. She has been separated from her parents, but takes some solace from learning that the rest of Giorgio’s family had reached safety.

Through most of the film, the characters (except for Bruno and Giorgio’s father) are cyphers. Why Giorgio thinks that he has any chance with Micol is particularly hard to fathom. The yearning younger boy of the flashbacks is more sympathetic than the priggish young adult Giorgio. At least he realizes how absurd heartbreak and jealousy are when the whole world around him is going to hell. Bassani wrote, “The heart, to be sure, always has something to say about what is to come, to him who heeds it. But what does the heart know? Only a little of what has already happened.” Alas, the film does not do very well at recording what happened, at least not at the level of the hearts of the characters.

The film won the Academy Award for best foreign film -- in a year in which it was not even the best Italian film. . . Along with what was the best Italian film of the year, it made Dominique Sanda a star, but a very shooting star she turned out to be, becoming an ex-star by 1971. I find it interesting that there is a film in which there is a man poutier than Helmut Berger (he was a beautiful protégé of Luchino Visconti who cast him as the title characters in “The Damned” and “Ludwig” Berger was excellent in one of my favorite films, “The Romantic Englishwoman” with Glenda Jackson and Michael Caine in 1975). What the young Finzi-Continis want remains vague, which I attribute more to the screenplay than to the inadequacies of the beautiful but opaque actors. Similarly, Giorgio’s escape is mentioned rather than shown. We are supposed to care about him, but not to be interested in how he escaped and how he survived the war, etc.? And if Micol was the center of his being, wouldn’t he have made some attempt to convince her to flee, too?

Seeing a restored version, the film struck me (again) as beautifully photographed, filled with attractive young people, and as cold as an Antonioni film. Ending with unpeopled shots of the Finzi-Contini estate makes it seem ever more like Antonioni (especially the end of “Eclipse”).

The characters do not seem to feel very much, and it is hard for the audience to care about their amours. Their persecution and suffering (except for Giorgio’s frustration that Micol doesn’t want him) not portrayed, except for the final round-up. The characters are understandably numb then, but even in the scenes of gathering the Jews it is mostly what the audience already knows about their fate, not anything on screen, that is moving. OK, this is not entirely true. There is the confusion of Micol’s grandmother (Inna Alexeieff), the dignity of the whole family, and the kindness of the two young men who give up their seats for Micol and her grandmother.

De Sica directed some of the most famous neo-realist films (Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Miracle in Milan, Umberto D), plus the delightful “Marriage, Italian Style.” He also acted in 166 films, usually as a worldly aristocrat (most notably in Max Ophuls’s wonderous “The earrings of Madame de...” in 1953), but most memorably as the title character in Roberto Rosselini’s Pirandelloesque masterpiece “Il Generale della Rovere” (1959).



Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older