The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Italy, 1971; 94 mins.
Directed by Vittorio de Sica

The story in the foreground of this film concerns the emotional lives of wealthy, privileged, mostly blond young people.  But the principal characters are Jewish, living in the late years of Mussolini's Italy, and their world crumbles around them in the course of the film.

The action of the film takes place from 1938 to 1943 in the North Italian town of Ferrara. As the film opens, the first anti-Semitic policies of the Italian Fascist regime are still quite new and their consequences uncertain.  It ends with round-ups and preparations for deportation.

Vittorio de Sica (1902-74), who had a long career as actor and director, is best known for his two classics of Italian neo-realism, Shoeshine (1946) and The Bicycle Thief (1948), both about the lives of Italy's poor.  This movie, based on a novel by Giorgio Bassani, is quite different.  Set among characters who mostly range from the well-to-do to the fabulously wealthy, it is color-drenched and elegiac.  The camera lingers on the faces of the principal actors, especially Capolicchio and the stunning Sanda.  The catastrophe that slowly overwhelms its privileged, refined, thoroughly acculturated Jewish characters is more indicated or hinted at than portrayed.  

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is more about what was lost, symbolized by the garden, than about what was to become of its people. It is not, in my view, an entirely satisfactory film. But it is a memorable one, and it deals with a country and a class that we otherwise don't get to see in this context -- unless in the first pages of Primo Levi's memoir.