The adaptation of the work of Giorgio Bassani by Vittorio de Sica, anicarized but disputed by the writer and not without faults, encourages the reading of this novel with Proustian accents.
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Reviewing the Garden of Finzi-Contini (1970) is to immerse yourself in endless reflection on the limits of the cinematographic adaptation of a masterpiece of world literature. Or two indisputable geniuses: Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), equivalent to a Transalpine Proust; and Vittorio de Sica (1901-1974), which will win, with this film, the golden bear in Berlin and the Oscar for the best film in a foreign language in 1971.
What link can there be between the trembled and misty universe of Bassani, entirely centered on the small Jewish community of Ferrare, in northern Italy, and that, more southern, of a director who has Make the cantor of Neapolitan identity?
The writer considered herself betrayed, although he himself had requested the director and he participated in the writing of the script. This recounts the inexorable confinement of a Jewish family which, as the racial laws promulgate in 1938, by Benito Mussolini, almost voluntarily cloister in its great property, reinventing the ghetto, accepting the end tragic waiting for him.
Few nuances
The characters have been standardized around a few character traits, probably to improve narrative efficiency. Micol (Dominique Sanda) seems to renounce love by stubbornness, while it is the consciousness of his future destiny that is the cause; Pale and feverish, Alberto (Helmut Berger), his brother, seems to repeat future scenes from Ludwig (1973), Luchino Visconti. Malnate (Fabio Testi) isn’t it a little too virile, even if he embodies a communist militant proud? Finally, Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio) is, on the contrary, a little flaot.
The tennis parties, which bring together on the property of the Finzi-Contini the young people of the Jewish community excluded from their club, as well as their friends, are filmed, according to the critic of the world of December 1971, “with plain of a sports report “. Let’s say that no one, among the actors, knows how to hold a racket, while Bassani was an emeritus player …
Ferrare, a city enclosed in its walls, is not very visible, while it is the essential element of the work of Bassani (which will title part of his work Le Roman de Ferrare). “The betrayed garden”, Fulmina the writer, in an article with vitriol, furious at what he considered as betrayals.
Half a century later, the film has lost none of its faults. There is no doubt lack of lengths and languor. An hour and a half, it is little to express the nuances, make a decor and characters exist until their disappearance. But these defects have the immense advantage of encouraging the (re) reading of a secret and powerful romantic work, trembled and diaphanous, where the memory of reality is more than the real itself.