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.
Certainly that might explain her
attraction to Malnate, but the visual evidence that she is having an affair
with him seems to contradict the other elements of de Sica’s film and, if
nothing else, takes away from the Finzi-Continis’ mysterious “otherness.”
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.
I mention all of this because, despite
the beauty of de Sica’s film, the story it tells seems tame and confused, as if
not only the work’s characters were blind to reality, but the director does not
clearly see the truth as well—or, at the very least, does not quite know where
to take his narrative. And, ultimately, that alters the film from what might be
seen as a kind of tragic vision to a merely “sad” one, transforming it into a kind
of Jewish version of The Bicycle Thief,
a pretty-to-look at, but slightly maudlin story.
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.
In this and others of his films it is
almost as if the figures in his landscapes cannot truly ever reach out to feel
for one another. They are all linked to one another by a spiraling destructive
force that does not quite allow them to truly interconnect. Alberto, it
appears, is too frail to even have a true love relationship with Malnate, Micòl
is destined, as she herself insists, to become a loveless old maid like the
subject of her thesis, Emily Dickinson (who, in fact, was far more full of passion
than almost anyone in the “garden” in which the Finzi-Continis live). Giorgio’s
family can neither imagine the lives of the aristocrats nor the Fascists.
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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