the uninhabited garden
by
Douglas Messerli
Vittorio
Bonicelli and Ugo Pirro (screenplay, based on the book by Giorgio Bassani),
Vittorio de Sica (director) Il giardino
dei Finzi-Contini
(The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) /
1970, USA 1971
As
World War II continued, Mussolini liked to call Italian Jews “his” Jews, and
was not always pleased with Germany’s demand that they be sent to the camps;
but early on, the Italian dictator very much emulated Hitler, sending thousands
to camps and disenfranchising them from Italian society in general, as Vittorio
de Sica’s film The Garden of the
Finzi-Continis, based on the autobiographical work by Giorgio Bassani,
reveals.
Yet de Sica’s work, which ends with the
mass arrestment of Ferrara Jews, does not truly focus on the Holocaust as much
as it does on the sad passivity of that Jewish community, symbolized by the
proud aristocratic Finzi-Continis, who hide away in a walled Edenic castle as
if still living in some 19th century fantasy world.
De Sica’s film begins with a kind of
mass intrusion of this separate entity as a group of mostly Jewish youths,
banned from the city’s tennis clubs, gather to
play in a kind of private tennis tournament,
hosted by the young Finzi-Continis son, Alberto (Helmut Berger) and his sister,
Micòl (Dominique Sanda). Most of the participants have never even been inside
of the Finzi-Continis estate, and are in awe of the walled garden and home. But
one, Giorgio (Lino Capollicchio) has for years regularly “jumped” that wall to
join Micòl with whom he is in love.
Although it first appears that Micòl is
also in love with him, gradually over the space of the film we sense her
reserve and, finally, rejection, as de Sica makes it clear that she is actually having an affair
with Alberto’s friend Bruno Malnate (Fabio Testi). Bassani’s work does not make
that relationship evident, and even the film director seems not quite what to
make of her change of heart, suggesting early on that Malnate may be having a
gay relationship with Alberto, and hinting that Micòl herself has a somewhat
incestuous relationship with her brother.
The relationship between Giorgio and his
middle class family oddly parallels the Finzi-Continis’ lack of awareness of
the world around them, Giorgio arguing with his father, who believes the
restrictions put upon them are livable and limited, without realizing how much
his son has already lost his freedom. Even visiting the local library is
forbidden, and Jews are no longer able to hire domestic help. Yet Giorgio’s
father can hardly believe that in their hauteur, that the Finzi-Continis are
actually Jews. In short, he too is blind to the truth of things.
As film critic David Thompson suggests
de Sica is he is a man of impeccable taste, but he does not truly feel for his
characters, almost painting them as figures for whom his audience should care
for but that he cannot quite bring himself to.
It is that standing back and deep
commitment to his artistry that helped, surely to kill Italian neorealism, and
made de Sica’s most thoughtful films less interesting than simply lovely to
look at.
The lovely youths who enter the garden in
the first scene never return, Malnate as well, who, inducted into the military,
dies in war. Only Giorgio seems able to transverse these worlds, but even he
seems to derive no joy from it and is misled. He is invited to use the great
Finzi-Continis library, but finds hardly anyone willing to engage him, the
father only vaguely promising him to show the original manuscripts on the very
subject of his poetic thesis. And, after visiting his brother in Grenoble,
France, Giorgio does not seem to comprehend that it is not safe to return to
Ferrara. His youthful arguments with his father seem almost complacent. And his
final escape—after his own parents and all the surviving Finzi-Continis are arrested—is
mentioned almost as an afterthought.
De Sica’s film is truly a handsome thing
to behold, and it justifiably won several awards including the Academy Award
for Best Foreign Language Film and the Golden Bear at the Berlin International
Film Festival. Its colors are splendiferous, its characters nearly all
beautiful or picaresque. It’s themes, isolation and self-delusion, remind one
at times of the faded world of the Belle Époque, almost like something out of
Visconti’s The Leopard. But Visconti’s
work is a far more solid one, while de Sica’s seems pallid and frail, a
butterfly that cannot truly express the horror behind the story that’s truly
being told. And, in the end, it’s almost as if its “garden” had never been
inhabited.
Los Angeles,
January 28, 2017
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