Amargo Despertar

A Brief Vacation is a quiet Italian drama from 1973, directed by Vittorio De Sica who was acclaimed for The Bicycle Thief a quarter century earlier.

Florinda Bolkan plays a female factory worker in Milan whose husband's employment has been sidelined for the time being by injury. Thus she is the breadwinner for a family that includes children, a mother-in-law, and a brother-in-law. She already is close to collapse from the wear and tear of her job, and the fatigue of the train commutes to and from it. Family members prove extremely selfish, increasing the stress and burden.

But she has a spot on her lung, a patch of tuberculosis, the equivalent of a golden war wound in combat. There is insurance for health care, and a guarantee of a continued flow of salary during leave for recuperation. The movie makes a welcome shift to a sanatorium in the Alps, where the only demands are to get plenty of sleep and rest and be pampered by the doctors, nurses, and other staffers. This is the brief vacation from which the movie title derives, and brings a chance to meet new friends and a pause to reflect on life. De Sica via the interruption produces another winner.

It might be added that it was a long wait to see the movie again. A Brief Vacation was never released on VHS, and consequently it took three full decades, and the advent of the DVD era, to bring the film to home viewers. Take advantage.

Vittorio De Sica collaborated again on this excellent film with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, as he had in the postwar "Shoe Shine," "The Bicycle Thief," Umberto D," and their 60s French film "A Young World." They have fashioned, from a story by Rodolfo Sonego, a realistic and at times romantic drama about an Italian housewife (Florinda Bolkan in an amazing performance), living in a Milan suburb and married to a crass husband (Renato Salvatori) who treats her like a pack animal.

She supports the husband, unemployed because of an accident as well as her three sons and several in-laws, by working in a grim factory worse than that in Petri's "The Working Class Goes to Heaven" or Rossellini's "Europa '51."

She collapses from exhaustion and TB and is sent at company expense for "una breve vacanza" at a sanatorium in the Dolomites. Here she experiences a major change and awakening, not merely physical and emotional (as in a tender relationship with a machinist) but a profound radical change in which she examines for the first time her fundamental nature as a human being and as a woman. She can never be the same after she returns home.

Italian class and sex attitudes are perceptively analyzed here, and there is un unforgettable characterization by Adriana Asti as a foul-mouthed yet compassionate woman in the last days of a terminal illness. (Remember her in Bertolucci's "Before the Revolution"?)

I find it ironic that though this great "feminist" movie was written and directed by men, it is more effective in that regard in ways that its contemporary "Swept Away," made by a woman, is not.

Those viewers who are feeling a little down about their own particular life situation may be a bit cheered when they see what Clara Mataro's daily grind is like, in Vittorio de Sica's 1973 offering "A Brief Vacation." The sole breadwinner in her family, living in a dingy, cramped apartment on the outskirts of Milan with her loutish husband, thuggish brother-in-law, waspishly senile mother-in-law and three young sons, her torturous job at a rubber factory is just another element in her daily hell. No wonder that when the National Health clinic forces her to go to a sanatorium in the Italian Alps to cure her incipient TB, Clara views this as the titular brief vacation. (If only the U.S. had a health care system like this!) Away from her usual troubles and surrounded by new friends, Clara inevitably blossoms, and that metamorphosis is wonderful to see. Florinda Bolkan, who had greatly impressed me in such marvelous gialli as "Lizard in a Woman's Skin" and "Don't Torture a Duckling," is superb here as Clara, especially when the prospect of a possible love affair at the sanatorium arises. Clara's fellow patients are a very interesting bunch; de Sica, the old neorealist master, directs winningly yet unobtrusively; son Manuel de Sica's theme song "Stay" is lush and superromantic; and the snowy backdrop of the Alpine countryside is often quite spectacular. So, does the film give poor Clara the reward of a happy ending? I would never dream of telling, but those who have seen such earlier de Sica classics as "The Bicycle Thief" and "Umberto D" might be able to guess. Clara Mataro is a remarkably well-drawn character, and my feeling is that most viewers will be very happy that they have spent a few brief hours with her....

This is not an adaptation of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. The only thing the two works have in common is that they both take place in a sanitarium. It's the story of a woman who has a horrible life of hard work and no appreciation. She takes ill and is sent by the government to a sanitarium where she thrives. Getting sick is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to her. I found this film extremely moving. Florinda Bolkan gives a great performance of subtle realism. A BRIEF VACATION is a brilliant film, right up there with De Sica's best, and it came late in his career. He directed only one more film afterward. I saw this film a couple of times in the 70s. I still think about scenes from it.

Finally available on DVD. I had been wanting to share this movie with friends for more than 30 years. It has always been on my top 10 list of best movies ever seen.What I remember most are the subtle scenes which communicate so much, the woman wrapping her meat patty from her factory provided lunch in a napkin and slipping it into her purse in order to be able to give it to her son later on. Or after finally going to see a doctor, first making a last-minute detour into a department store to buy new underwear, too embarrassed that the doctor would see her in what she had on. Or at the very end, when the train passes by the billboard with the Mao graffiti on it (the most subtle of political comment). This is a splendid and brilliant movie, exposing the complexity of social circumstance without ever taking the easy way out, or suggesting there is ever an easy answer, in this case just a brief vacation.