The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Blooms Again

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Previews

Published on Wednesday, 29 August 2012 13:51

Written by Laura Blum

With fall in the works and the cultural frenzy that comes with it, fans of classic Italian cinema will want to mark their calendars for October 23, 7:30 pm. That’s when the vintage Avon Theatre in Stamford, Connecticut is set to screen The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. 

Jointly presented with JCC Greenwich and the Italian Cultural Insititute of New York, this Critic's Choice showing is a rare opportunity to catch legendary director Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief) at the top of his game. Finzi-Continis won the 1971 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

You'll bask in the lush setting, the ripe score, the dreamy ambiance. But you won't want to get too comfortable. The fate awaiting our beautiful and privileged protagonists is no less than an expulsion from Eden.

Inspired by a real family, the Finzi-Continis are Jewish owners of a gracious manor house cloistered from the outside by high walls, luxuriant grounds and the tranquility of a gentler era. There's even a 500-year-old tree that the Borgias may have planted. The adult children, elegant Micòl (Dominique Sanda) and Alberto (Helmut Berger), entertain their friends with endless rounds of tennis and picnics, as befits their carefree aristocratic life in Ferrara, Italy.

Yet it’s 1938 and the close of an epoch stretching back to the Middle Ages that has granted the local Jewish community a modicum of communal protections. Leave it to the less affluent and cushioned co-religionists to detect the writing on the wall as, one by one, social prerogatives become increasingly off-limits.

One such middle-class landsman is Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio), who is mortified by Mussolini’s edicts. A friend of the family, he has loved Micòl since their youth, and imagines that she reciprocates his affections. Micòl, however, is busy carrying on with Giorgio’s Gentile friend Bruno Malnate (Fabio Testi), a manly jock who’s soon to enter the armed forces.

Recent racial purity decrees forbid Jews from doing just that -- serving in the military -- as well as from marrying non-Jews, attending public schools, being listed in the phone directory and engaging Aryan servants. These restrictions seem to occur beyond the pale of the Finzi-Continis. As Giorgio's father notes, “They are different. They don't even seem to be Jewish." Yet no amount of wealth, standing, credentials or obliviousness could shield the victims of Fascism from its intensifying thrust.

A surprising footnote here is that anti-Semitism was not part of the Italian Fascist platform during Mussolini’s first 15 or so years in power. According to Giorgio Bassani -- author of the 1962 autobiographical novel on which the film is based -- most of the Ferrarese Jewish community held party membership until Nazi ideology invaded Italy.

Bassani, who also collaborated on the film's screenplay, helped De Sica imagine the looming sense of loss that the community struggled with in the years leading up to and during the war. In 1943, after northern Italy was occupied by Nazi forces, Ferrara’s small Jewish community was sent to the concentration camps; only one of its 183 deportees came home.

De Sica looks back and forward on history, showing the specter of tragedy through the characters' unfolding awareness. Painting with symbols, he equates the safe, idyllic gardens of the Finzi-Contini palazzo with the past. Similarly, Giorgio represents an innocent childhood bond for Micòl, allowing her to tolerate him as a platonic relationship. Yet to regard him as a romantic partner would mean swapping yesterday for tomorrow, an altogether too frightening notion in her vulnerable state of denial.

Following the October screening, Columbia University professor Alexander Stille will shed light on these and other key issues explored in this film of unusual power and merit.

For tickets and information, contact jccgreenwich.org or (203) 552-1818.

Avon Theatre
272 Bedford Street
Stamford, CT 06901 
avontheatre.org 

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