The Garden of the Finzi-Continis = Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini

Made towards the end of his life, de Sica’s “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” is one of the Italian director’s finest achievements. In this movie de Sica turns his gaze away from the urban working class lives that dominated his neo-realist cinema, and instead focuses on the lives of an aristocratic Jewish family leading up to the tragedy of World War II. Based on Giorgio Bassini’s acclaimed novel of the same name, the film details the experiences of love, family and politics as seen through the eyes of the adults and the adolescents in the Finzi-Contini family. The children attempt to make their mansion a refuge against fascism, a perpetual romantic space to re-live their childhood games and preoccupations. The adults, in turn, hope that by accommodating to the increasingly humiliating “race-laws” they will buy time and live to see the restoration of the old social order. But as Italy joins Germany in war, all their attempts prove futile against the savage anti-Semitism of fascism. In the film’s devastating concluding passage, the tragedy of European twentieth-century history is conveyed in the stark faces of the family, stripped of their luxuries and belongings; stripped of their illusions and their hope. The film is a loving remembrance of a specifically Italian Jewish history and culture: de Sica’s ability to immerse us in the textures and colours of a vanquished past is one of this film’s greatest achievements. It’s dignified simplicity in presenting the horror of the Holocaust makes it one of the most eloquent of anti-war films. (Awards: Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Winner of the Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival. With Dominique Sanda, Helmut Berger) In Italian with English subtitles.