"Brief Vacation" is the penultimate film by Vittorio De Sica (1902 -1974) , two years after his fourth Academy Award winning-film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971) was an international success. That is a somewhat chilly film, unlike the early neorealist classics (Bicycle Thief, Shoeshine), though the cinematography of Ennio Guarnieri is very beautiful there , as it also is in "A Brief Vacation" (and in Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon ).
With another screenplay by frequent De Sica collaborator Cesare Zavattini, "A Brief Vacation" takes the viewer into closer intimacy with its main character, Clara Mataro (played by Florinda Bolkan, who is best known as the female lead in "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion"), than was the case for the Finzini-Continis.

Clara is part of the post-World War II emigration from southern Italy to Milan (most memorably portrayed in Visconti’s "Rocco and His Brothers"). Clara and her husband Franco (played by Renato Salvatori who played Simone, Rocco’s evil older brother), are from Calabria (rather than Sicily). Franco is off work after being hit by a motorcycle. Only Clara’s factory job is bringing in any income. She is exhausted by the job, three children, and a husband who is contributing nothing to maintaining the household but is still making plenty of demands, including sex every night.

Later, Clara tells a new friend that she and Franco married for love but that now "we’re too poor to think about it, with seven mouths to feed."

Clara, who has never taken a sick day off, collapses at work. Waiting at the public health clinic, she meets Luigi (Daniel Quenaud), who convinces her that it is better to go for coffee and sit down than to wait standing up. She is seen by her brother-in-law and has to endure a major jealousy tantrum on top of everything else.

The next day she returns to the clinic with her husband and mother-in-law. They say nothing about their belief she was screwing around the previous day but are not at all receptive to the idea of Clara going off to a tuberculosis sanitarium for a month or more. The physician is insistent that her life depends upon it, and off to the Italian Alps she goes.

Her treatment is the first vacation she has ever had, and, no doubt, the first solitude. She has a room to herself, and reads Mazonni and Tolstoy. She also is quickly annexed by some a clique of lively patients who entertain themselves with a makeover of her, and has a delicate romance (Luigi). The idyll (not to mention a date) is interrupted by a visit from the family, and how lasting the transformations that occurred in the mountains will be is uncertain. Clara tells Luigi that "Milan has a way of knocking the love out of people." The ending is downbeat, but somewhat open, not like the crushing of those portrayed in De Sica’s early, neorealist films.

Evaluations

As Clara, Florinda Bolkan is beautiful and lacking in vanity. Forced to take care of herself and inspired by female solidarity and the love of a man less brutish than her husband, Clara blossoms in the snow. "A Brief Vacation" sometimes seems like standard-issue early-1970s feminist uplift with marinara sauce, though I guess a case could easily be made that the brutish, unreasonably demanding husband and the more sensitive male who appreciates the heroine is a staple of soap operas everywhere.

Clara is likable, but fairly passive, not a volcano like Anna Magnani or Sophia Loren in earlier De Sica and/or neorealist films. There are few emotional fireworks in what is a contemplative movie about a comtemplative pause in Clara’s hard life.

The institutions of society in "A Brief Vacation" are considerably more benign than those shown in the early neorealist classics. The public health clinic seems daunting and a faceless bureaucracy, but eventually there is a face, and one demanding that Clara stop working and recuperate. At the sanitarium, Clara has not only enforced leisure, but better food and (through the interest in her new friends) more glamorous makeup and clothes than she was used to having. And the views!

The alpine scenery is impressive, and Ennio Guarnieri filmed the exteriors to maximum effect. (The DVD picture is excellent; there is no mention of restoration, so I’d guess a pristine print was used for the transfer.) De Sica’s son Manuel supplied an unobtrusive musical score (as he had for "The Garden of the Finzini-Continis").

While I was watching the film, I thought its pace was too slow, though by the next day my valuation of the film had increased, and there are no particular scenes I think should have been cut—only that some of them need not have run quite as long as they did.

DVD Bonuses

On the disk with "A Brief Vacation" are two segments of the 1967 De Sica/Zavattini vehicle for Shirley MacLaine , " Woman Times Seven", the first and last with lengthy opening and closing titles. If it is advertising for a future release on DVD of that set of variations on the theme of adultery, it is not particularly effective.






Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age