Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini

The expansive garden of the upper middle class Jewish Finzi-Contini family in Ferrara becomes a meeting point for young people at the end of the 1930s. Alberto (Helmut Berger) and Micòl (Dominique Sanda) manage both their friendships and their love affairs there, equal parts unbothered and unimpressed by Italian fascism. Their friendship circle also includes Giorgio, who comes from a less wealthy Jewish family and has fallen in love with Micòl. The beginning of the Second World War and the implementation of the race laws destroy the seeming idyll. Vittorio De Sica directs this melodrama in quietly elegiac fashion, showing in filigree allusions how civilization is destroyed. (hjf)