Le jardin des Finzi-Contini

One of the most celebrated foreign films in history, "The Garden of the Finzi-Contini" has been re-released so that people who missed it in 1971 can see the film restored as it was originally meant to be viewed -- then ask themselves WHAT WAS ALL THE FUSS ABOUT!!!!!

This film recounts the fall of a Jewish family during Mussolini's rise in Italy during World War II. The story follows Giorgio as he tries to surf outside his social class and win over the cute but cold-as-ice Micol. He fails, along with the film.

This is NOT a great film. Like many period pieces, it's a stately bore. The plot and character development take forever to build any steam. Just when you begin to care a little about the characters -- the movie ends. Or, more accurately, just stops, dead in in tracks, not a single plotline resolved. Characters just disappear along the way, randomly, with no dramatic impact. It's photography was way too detached from it's subject matter until it's too late. In the end, too frustrating to be entertaining and too boring to be thought-provoking.

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS holds its audience at arm's length. As a result, Giorgio's romantic plight, which occupies considerable screen time, has a limited emotional impact. Since we never really get close to him, aspects of the movie are less compelling than they might otherwise have been. The film's often-detached perspective allows us to focus more clearly on presentation and issues, but at the expense of caring about the characters.

DeSica directed many masterpieces but this film does not qualify as a masterpiece nor does it stand the test of time.

In this haunting work by Vittoria De Sica an aristocratic Italian-Jewish family, the Finzi-Continis, serve as a symbol of European civilization in the hands of the brown shirts on the eve of World War II. Seeing it again after thirty years I find myself saddened almost as much by the story of a stillborn, unrequited love as I am by the horror of the cattle cars to come.

Dominique Sanda with her large, soft eyes is mesmerizing as the beautiful, enigmatic, but icy Micol Finzi-Contini. Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio) is her childhood friend, a boy from a middle-class Jewish family, now grown up. He's in love with her, but her feelings for him are that of a sister. He is confused by her warmth, and then as he tries to get close, her cool rejection. It has often been expressed metaphorically that Europe in the thirties was raped by fascism. However in this extremely disturbing film, De Sica is saying that it wasn't a rape, that the aristocracy of Europe (here represented by the Finzi-Continis of Ferrara, and in particular by the young and beautiful Micol) was a willing, even an eager, participant in the bestial conjoining.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is far from perfect; some would say it is also far from De Sica's best work. Certainly it comes after his prime. The editing is a little too severe in places, while some of the scenes are too loosely focused. Nonetheless this is an enormously powerful film that finds its climax in one of the most disturbing scenes in all of cinema. There is little point in discussing this film without looking at this scene. Consequently, for those of you who have not seen the film and do not want to risk having it spoiled for you, you should stop reading now and come back afterwards.

Everything in the movie works toward setting up the cabana scene. We see the dog several times, hinting at a crude, animalistic side to Micol. And there is the wall that separates the Finzi-Contini's garden of civilization from the brown shirts in the streets, a wall that also separates the rich from other people, particularly from the middle class who support the fascists (as we are told in the opening scene). We see Micol leading Giorgio by the hand about the estate, but always when he tries to caress her, she pulls away. Finally she explains to him why she doesn't love him. She says, "lovers want to overwhelm each other...[but]...we are as alike as two drops of water...how could we overwhelm and want to tear each other...it would be like making love with a brother..." But hearing these words is not enough. Giorgio goes to the wall one last time, sees a red bicycle there (red and black were the colors of the Nazi party) and knows that Micol is with someone else. He climbs the wall and finds the dog outside the cabana so that he knows she is within. In the opening scene she referred to the cabana with the German "Hütte," adding that now "we'll all have to learn German." What he sees when he looks through the window fills him with a kind of stupefying horror, as it does us. Not a word is spoken. He sees her, he sees who she is with and what the circumstances are. She sees him, turns on the light so that there can be no mistake and they stare wordlessly at one another. She projects not shame, but a sense of "This is who I am. I would say I'm sorry, but it wouldn't change anything. This is what I'm drawn to."

What is expressed in this essentially symbolic scene, acted out in sexual terms, is what happened to Europe. Micol is at once the love he wanted so much, deflowered by an anonymous, but clearly fascist man, and she is also the aristocracy of Europe, polluted by fascism.

I wonder if it is just a coincidence that the famous poem by Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess," is also set in Ferrara. In that poem the narrator reveals himself through the unfeeling brutality of his speech and actions to be, although an aristocrat, an incipient fascist. I also wonder if De Sica is saying that the Jews in some sense contributed to the horror that befell them, and by extension, all of humanity. We see this expressed in the person of Giorgio's father who continually insists that it's not that bad yet, as step by step they lose their status as citizens, a prelude to the dehumanization that is the precursor of genocide. Certainly the closing scenes in which the Jews of Italy are seen to be compliant as they are led to the slaughter suggests as much. I know that the central feeling expressed by Jews after the war and especially in Israel was simply, never again. Nevertheless, there is a certain sense of the inevitable about this film that I find particularly disturbing. Passivity in sexual terms, a "giving in" to one's nature is one thing. A passivity in political terms is quite another, and yet it is part of the power of this film to show us how they are related in our psyches.

I first heard a radio adaptation from the Garden of the Finzi Contini and afer that read the book. I thought it would be difficult to make an adaptation to cinema. Indeed, the book is above all psychological (or romantic in the literary meaning of the 19th century)i.e the narrator describing his inner world and his sufferings...

However, Vittorio de Sica succeeded in expressing this without using monologue, without making a too slow picture... The music is very good too... the images are wonderful...

I must correct some commentaries Malnate, Micol's lover is not a fascist but a communist... There is also a difference with the book : in the book we do not know for sure that Micol and Malnate were lovers, it is an assumption whereas it is an evidence in the film...

In spite of this differences, this picture deserves a 10 out of 10!

In THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS -- based on the autobiographical novel by Giorgio Bassani -- legendary Neorealist filmmaker, Vittorio de Sica, dramatizes the human cost of the `racial laws' gradually implemented against the Jews in Fascist Italy during the years 1938-43. The more Bassani's young middle-class Jewish protagonist feels the brunt of Mussolini's anti-Semitic edicts encroaching upon him, the more he feels drawn to the aristocratic Jewish Finzi-Continis' estate -- their Edenic "garden" -- and to Micòl, the family's beautiful young daughter. Psychologically, this compulsion seems to stem from a deep emotional attachment to a perpetually innocent, untroubled state of childhood, which both Micòl and her garden seem to represent. Throughout the film, there is a marked conflict between childhood and adulthood, between the distant past and the immediate present, between the act of retreating into a world of comfortable illusions and confronting a world of harsh and bitter realities.

I found this particular aspect of the story very fascinating, although too tantalizingly obscure and open-ended -- and thus, not quite as illuminating or fulfilling as it might have been were it more clearly explained. (This could the reason why some people find the film -- and its heavily symbolic, impressionistic style -- a little confusing and underwhelming.)

For Giorgio -- both the naive hero and wisened author of the story -- Micòl embodies the mystery and allure of the Finzi-Continis, as well as their insularity and their apparent passivity in the face of the escalating Fascist crackdown. She always appears distant and unattainable, with no obvious reasons for her actions, and never really provides a direct, comprehensible explanation for her insistent rejection of Giorgio or for what appears to be a subtle streak of cruelty towards him. Her conversation with him always seems deliberately vague, and her refusal to make any further connection with him has a curious, almost perverse kind of fatalism about it. Again, this is another feature of the film that is certainly intriguing -- and strangely seductive -- but, alas, never quite pays off enough to become fully understandable to either the protagonist or the audience. When the Fascists finally do arrest the Finzi-Continis and confiscate their estate it comes as something of a surprise. The muted and deliberately spare representation of these characters and their feelings, as evidenced in their unusually restrained behavior, is meant to isolate and heighten the impact of a few devastating strokes of sudden realization and lucidity -- pointed indications that the protective spell of the Finzi-Continis has been finally broken.

All in all, well-acted and gorgeously, languidly poetic in its imagery...yet, narrative-wise, the picture seems overly elliptical and ultimately opaque -- and leaves just a few too many rough fragments and loose ends lingering at the end of the story (not quite Proustian irony, maybe?). In spite of this peculiar drawback, the film finishes very effectively, and by the final desolate shots, you are left with an unexpectedly intense feeling of loss and anguish. It is important to note, however, that the last scene -- in which Giorgio's father meets the Finzi-Continis in a detention center -- is fictitious and does not appear in the novel, and Bassani had a falling out with de Sica about this.

I just watched the DVD and had not seen the movie in many years. I found it every bit as moving as I had remembered from my first viewing. This included the Prayer For the Dead (El Moleh Rachamim) magnificently sung as the final credits rolled. I am not Jewish so I had to do some "googling" to learn that El Moleh...is indeed a prayer for the dead. What moved me so apart from the singer's mournfully beautiful voice were the names Aushwitz, Maidenek, Treblinka et. al. interpolated into the text. It reminded me of the penultimate paragraph in Andre Schwartz-Bart's extraordinary novel of the Holacaust, The Last Of The Just where the names of the death camps are artfully placed among the repeated words "And praised Be The Lord". Thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts.