The Movies

We've joined a new DVD library, with the promising name of Cinema Paradiso. In the last week I've seen Adaptation, Frida, Blood Simple, and Day For Night - all remarkable moves. And two that weren't so good: Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women, and a self-consciously whimsical German film, Tuvalu.

So, last night we watched De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970). (It won an Oscar in 1971 as Best Foreign Film; De Sica won a Golden Bear as Best Director at the 1971 Berlin Film Festival.) The film is set in Ferrarra, Italy between 1938-1943. It is visually beautiful, and starts out looking carefree, as a group of young people in tennis whites bicycle up to the huge garden of the Jewish Finzi-Continis for an afternoon of tennis.

But as the film progresses, the liberties of the Jews are taken away one by one, quietly, almost always politely. The tennis afternoon itself occurs because Jews have been expelled from the town's tennis club. The Finzi-Continis retreat within the walls of their estate, pretend that the world has not changed. The father of another character tries to convince himself that Italian fascism is better than German fascism, that somehow things will work out.

At the end of the film the town's Jews are rounded up. As they wait to be sent away, there's a scene of memory, of three of the characters playing tennis, laughing, while what I presume to be a prayer for the dead is sung in the background.

The movie is very restrained, as it shows how easily the ground can be cut away, piece by piece, by official decree clothed in the garments of patriotism. Perhaps it was the quietness of the film that made it so frightening to me, so real, and so affecting.