The Garden Of The Finzi Continis
by Vittorio De Sica
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Dominique Sanda, Fabio Testi, Helmut Berger, Lino Capolicchio, Romolo ValliDirector: Vittorio De Sica
Writer: Alain Katz
Writer: Cesare Zavattini
Writer: Franco Brusati
Writer: Giorgio Bassani
Writer: Tullio Pinelli
Writer: Ugo Pirro
Writer: Valerio Zurlini
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Italian (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 94 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-06-19
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Movie Reviews of The Garden Of The Finzi Continis
Movie Review: Best Foreign Film 1970
Summary: 5 Stars
What makes the film so memorable is its almost dreamlike atmosphere. The Finzi-Contini's garden is a many acred forest replete with wooded paths and tennis court where time seems to stand still as in an Italian pastoral painting. The family is wealthy and influential and so though Jewish remains at a comfortable remove from those events effecting most Italian Jews. The children of the Finzi-Continis are the effeminate, withdrawn and sickly Alberto and the beautiful and artistic and tempermental but emotionally cold Micol(Dominique Sanda). Micol seems to intuit the coming events before they happen and that explains why she refuses any intimate connection. Her love from youth is Grigorio but she wants nothing to do with real emotions from which she knows nothing can come. over Grigorio she chooses intimacies that demand nothing from her emotionally. In one particularly poignant scene Grigorio spies her through a window after she has been making love and she aware of his gaze shamelessly refuses to try and hide the fact as if conveying to him their mutual sense of helplessness. Micol knows what is to come but powerless to do anything about it she retreats into herself further and further. The garden is equated with Micol, symbolizing her sense of beauty, love of art, and culture itself. The gardens isolated quiet surrounded by walls merely emphasizes Micols passive nature in the face of events that will devestate everything about life that she values. DeSica keeps the pace of his film a deliberately slow one and rarely shows you the events happening outside the small Finzi-Contini circle except in brief glimpses of newsreel footage seen in movie theatres so that when the final events unfold they are all the more shocking even though they have been expected all along. And when the Black Shirts do come round to collect all Jews the Finzi-Continis are dressed and waiting. A very moving film for its subtlely crafted and quiet depiction of civilization being undermined by brutal forces. Dominique Sanda is beautiful and fascinatingly complex. Her scenes reward repeat viewings, she is an actress with an uncommon ability to convey deep stirrings of the soul without words. Also out in 1970 were Bertolucci's Conformist and Fellinis Satyricon. Viva Italia!
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