The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Hommage à Helmut Berger)
Hommage à Helmut Berger
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Il giardino dei Finzi Contini Italie-Allemagne 1970 | Vittoria De Sica | vostEN | 94’ | 35mm | Cast: Lino Capolicchio, Dominique Sanda, Helmut Berger
► Best Foreign Language Film, Oscars 1972
► Goldener Bär, Berlin 1971
Ferrara, at the end of the 1930s. The hopes and dreams of a local Jewish family are swept away by the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Italy under Mussolini.
« An extraordinary film, full of melancholy glamour. » (Pauline Kael)
« De Sica's film creates a feeling of nostalgia for a lost time and place, but it isn't the nostalgia of looking back. It's the nostalgia of the time itself, when people still inhabiting their world could sense it slipping away, and already missed what they had not yet lost. » (Roger Ebert)
« A forgotten Italian masterpiece. Profound passion and anguished terror collide in Vittorio de Sica’s 1970 Oscar-winner. The real star is the garden itself, photographed in that plangent glow that marks so much European cinema of the time, with its exotic palm trees adored by Micòl, and the huge, ancient plane tree that she claims was planted by Lucrezia Borgia. It is here that Giorgio is to kiss Micòl and where his own terrible sadness is planted. » (The Guardian)
