Rent The Garden of the Finzi Contini (1970)

Hard Times in pre war Italy. - The Garden of the Finzi Contini review by Cato

A moving story of unrequited love, in which two rich Jewish families find themselves on the brink of very hard times in Mussolini's Italy. A rather beautiful film in which love seems fated from the very beginning. I watched it twice.

A tale of love and fate in Fascist Italy, in the 1930s and 1940s - The Garden of the Finzi Contini review by Philip in Paradiso

In the late 1930s, in Ferrara, a group of young friends get together for afternoons of tennis and flirting. Some of them are Italian Jews: Fascism is imposing increasing restrictions on their lives. The film ends in 1943, when the situation of Italian Jews had deteriorated immensely and the destruction of the Jewish community loomed very large.

It is the tale of 2 families -- one of them reasonably well-off, and the other very rich. The garden in the title belongs to the house of the immensely rich family, the Finzi Continis. It is also a love story, which is set against the tragic backdrop of the war and the Fascist regime in Italy. But, for much of the film, the love story in question, in all its complexities, twists and turns, is actually centre-stage, as if it mattered more than the bigger picture.

The film is beautiful and melancholy. There is no doubt that it is a very good film and 'a classic'. However, I also found the action quite slow and the plot somewhat predictable: in actual fact, not a lot happens in the course of the 90 mins that the film lasts. So, I would recommend it, but not without some slight reservations.

Tennis in a Time of Denial - The Garden of the Finzi Contini review by griggs

This one feels like drifting into a dream just as history turns into a nightmare. You spend a lot of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis on that tennis court and inside those walls, watching a wealthy Jewish family treat fascism like bad weather that will surely pass. Spoiler: it doesn’t

De Sica shoots it with a calm, deceptive beauty – soft light, unshowy tracking shots, and a gentle, melancholy score. The elegance feels quietly wrong-footing as the racial laws tighten mostly off-screen. You see how easy it is to keep playing games, literal and emotional, while the world quietly closes in.

I’m not sure the characters ever quite step out from behind the glass; they’re fascinating, but a bit like museum pieces. Still, as a study of people fiddling with their love lives while the world closes in, it lingers. A beautiful film about the danger of assuming the worst can’t happen here.