In "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" (1970)--based on the autobiographical novel by Giorgio Bassani--legendary Neorealist filmmaker, Vittorio de Sica, dramatizes the human cost of the "racial laws" gradually implemented against the Jews in Fascist Italy during the years 1938-43. The more Bassani's young middle-class Jewish protagonist feels the brunt of Mussolini's anti-Semitic edicts encroaching upon him, the more he feels drawn to the aristocratic Jewish Finzi-Continis' estate--their Edenic "garden"--and to Micòl, the family's beautiful young daughter. Psychologically, this compulsion seems to stem from a deep emotional attachment to a perpetually innocent, untroubled state of childhood, which both Micòl and her garden seem to represent. Throughout the film, there is a marked conflict between childhood and adulthood, between the distant past and the immediate present, between the act of retreating into a world of comfortable illusions and confronting a world of harsh and bitter realities.

I found this particular aspect of the story very fascinating, although too tantalizingly obscure and open-ended--and thus, not quite as illuminating or fulfilling as it might have been were it more clearly explained. (This could the reason why some people find the film--and its heavily symbolic, impressionistic style--a little confusing and underwhelming.)

For Giorgio--both the naive hero and wisened author of the story--Micòl embodies the mystery and allure of the Finzi-Continis, as well as their insularity and their apparent passivity in the face of the escalating Fascist crackdown. She always appears distant and unattainable, with no obvious reasons for her actions, and never really provides a direct, comprehensible explanation for her insistent rejection of Giorgio or for what appears to be a subtle streak of cruelty towards him. Her conversation with him always seems deliberately vague, and her refusal to make any further connection with him has a curious, almost perverse kind of fatalism about it.

Again, this is another feature of the film that is certainly intriguing--and strangely seductive-- but, alas, never quite pays off enough to become fully understandable to either the protagonist or the audience.

When the Fascists finally do arrest the Finzi-Continis and confiscate their estate it comes as something of a surprise. The muted and deliberately spare representation of these characters and their feelings, as evidenced in their unusually restrained behavior, is meant to isolate and heighten the impact of a few devastating strokes of sudden realization and lucidity--pointed indications that the protective spell of the Finzi-Continis has been finally broken.

All in all, well-acted and gorgeously, languidly poetic in its imagery...yet, narrative-wise, the picture seems overly elliptical and ultimately opaque--and leaves just a few too many rough fragments and loose ends lingering at the end of the story (not quite Proustian irony, maybe?). In spite of this peculiar drawback, the film finishes very effectively, and by the final desolate shots, you are left with an unexpectedly intense feeling of loss and anguish.

"The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" is a very unusual and interesting (and thankfully, non-sentimental and non-self-important) addition to the ever-expanding canon of dramatic films about life in the shadow of the Holocaust.

Good show. I give this one four out of five stars.

It's not surprising that Michael Radford, the director of that great film of Orwell's novel, "Nineteen Eighty-four," was tearing his hair out when he heard about this proposed soundtrack. Richard Branson, the head of Virgin, the British multimedia conglomerate bankrolling the film, had taken it upon himself to have a contemporary pop act compose some danceable, radio-friendly music for the movie as a means of giving it some more marketable cachet since the production was going wildly overbudget. Ultimately, what they got was this truly strange New Wave novelty from Eurythmics. The director had already agreed on a more appropriate orchestral score by Dominic Muldowney and he vociferously denounced Virgin's behest to use the Eurythmics' music as both a professional betrayal and an infringement on his artistic freedom. As a result, only fragmentary bits and pieces of the pop duo's "soundtrack" were actually used in the film, and Mr. Radford said some none too kind words about Eurythmics and the whole debacle on a televised awards show.

The music that appears on this album (faithfully plugged in the movie's closing credits), is, as the liner notes inform us, merely "derived from Eurythmics' original score for the film, 1984" (go figure). Suffice to say, "1984: For the Love of Big Brother" is not really a soundtrack per se but, more accurately, a collection of contemporary pop songs conceptually BASED on "Nineteen Eighty-four" (think of something along the lines of Madonna's "I'm Breathless" album for the movie "Dick Tracy" and you'll know what I mean), and as such, it doesn't entirely work.

Musically, this album has a certain appeal--it's all doomy, gloomy Teutonic synth mantras and martial electro-beats: if you like New Order or Kraftwerk or the late 70's Bowie-Eno collaborations you might go for this CD. Thematically though, this album is a bit hard to take, especially on two particular songs. The lyrics for "Sexcrime" and "Doubleplusgood" are preposterously silly in their naive, corny literal-mindedness. "Sexcrime" has a self-consciously Top-of-the-Pops-"hit-single"-circa- 1984 quality stamped all over it (the dreadful music video will make you cringe) and Annie Lennox's histrionic vocal obbligato just sounds crudely intrusive in this context. "Doubleplusgood," on the other hand, is even more egregious: it's a very thin, rather stupid, and bludgeoningly repetitive joke based on a trivial bit of background dialogue seriously intended in the film. Mercifully, neither track is featured in the film.

The one track that actually IS used--as a matter of fact, it serves consistently as the movie's romantic lietmotiv--is the gorgeous, haunting accoustic ballad, "Julia." It's a heart-breakingly lovely song that, miraculously, manages to ENHANCE the film's tremendous emotional impact in spades. But for no other reason, Eurythmics' otherwise dubious participation in the movie was worthwhile--this one stand-out six-and-a-half-minute track is the only compelling reason for owning this CD. I give "Julia" five stars, the rest of the songs, one or two, three at best. So, as you can see, I've split the difference in my overall rating.

I just wish that a proper soundtrack including the little sonic snippets of the used Eurythmics music and the whole of "Julia," as well as all of Dominic Muldowney's great, stirring score, was released instead of this generally self-indulgent and sometimes embarassing hodgepodge. What a pity it was not to be. At least they could come out with a CD single of "Julia."

Unless, you're a serious Eurythmics fan or completist, my advice would be to skip this CD--but by all means, for the love of Big Brother AND great art, buy, BUY the video of Radford's wonderful, stunning, passionate film. (You'll hear enough of "Julia" in the movie, and if you have any kind of aesthetic or emotional sensitivity at all, you won't be able to get it out of your head, believe me.)

Roman Polanski's notoriously violent film of Shakespeare's notorious "Scottish play" doesn't quite satisfy as it should. His bleak modernist interpretation is ultimately just too limiting, still it's certainly a bruvura piece of moviemaking and can be best appreciated as such. After all, this is not really Shakespeare per se but a Polanski film: the prevailing themes of witchcraft, rampant paranoia, and finally triumphant evil pick up right where "Rosemary's Baby" left off. And life is certainly nasty, brutish, and short in this movie--Shakespeare's poetry takes a backseat to a surfeit of excruciatingly detailed mutilations with plenty of blades slashing through jugular veins, culminating in a truly epic decapitation. This "Macbeth" is a relentless homicidal debauch: Polanski displays the same technical virtuosity and gruesome inventiveness in staging the numerous murders here as he did in "Repulsion." All of Shakespeare's famous metaphors (e.g., "is this a dagger I see before me?") are garishly literalized and deliberately engineered as part of an escalating series of spectacular, cathartic, bloodier-than-hell set-pieces. Visually, the film is rich and vivid: the forbidding images of rain-swept moors and twilit horizons possess a spellbinding primeval quality. And there are a few brilliant, inspired moments such as when our murderous Scot, whilst lying in his bed-chamber, broods "I am so stepped in blood..." and the whole room is bathed in an eerie crimson light. But the scene that truly stands out is when he visits the witches in their lair and is shown his fate: it's a gorgeous, thrilling, and strikingly imaginative surrealist reverie. The actors--nearly all British stage pros--are solid and reliable. As Macbeth, morose, dark-eyed Jon Finch is really quite good--and he certainly does have the diction for the role. But Francesca Annis's sickly nymphet Lady Macbeth is a glaring (and oh-so-characteristic) lapse in judgement on the director's part. Weak-voiced, pasty-faced, and generally irritating, this petulant little urchin has neither the skill nor the presence to adequately bring off one of Shakespeare's most formidable women. Annis's feeble performance renders the basic psychological premise of the play--Lady Macbeth's manipulation of her husband to fulfill her delusions of grandeur--unconvincing to say the least. Finch just looks uncomfortably stricken while Annis acts coy and childish. All in all, Polanski's "Macbeth" is a decidedly thorny piece of work: since it was his first film following the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and friends by members of the Charles Manson cult, he seems to have had too much to prove here. By dispensing with the Bard's customary knot-tying closing speech and ending instead with an abrupt silent scene suggesting basically that the cycle of treachery and murder will spiral forever through the ages, Polanski overstates his case.

Ken Russell's film, "The Devils"--based on John Whiting's play of the same name and Aldous Huxley's excellent historical treatise, "The Devils of Loudun"--is a drama set in seventeenth-century France dealing with the tribulations of one Urbain Grandier, a Jesuit canon of a self-governing, fortified, provincial town called Loudun. Because of his opposition to the demolition of the city walls and the subjugation of the resistant Protestant Huguenot population, the priest is accused of bewitching a convent of Ursuline nuns and subsequently tried and condemned by ruthless, conspiratorial Catholic authorities of Cardinal Richelieu's incipiently theocratic nationalist regime. As a film, "The editing is clumsy and disjointed and the murky photography makes everything--particularly the Brueghel-inspired shots of maggot-infested corpses borne up on wheels--look like regurgitated sour milk. Although the aspects of historical drama are potentially fascinating, Russell is just too crude and literal-minded a director--and with apparently too jaundiced an eye--to give the story any real deep sense of tragedy or social injustice. The movie merely sets out to shock and horrify with a monomoniacal emphasis on extremely gruesome forms of physical torture, and needless to say, the cautionary elements of Huxley's complex, thoughtful book get lost amidst all of Russell's garishly overwrought baroque-burlesque horror theatrics. What holds the film together if anything does is Oliver Reed's formidable if slightly (inexplicably?) creepy portrayal of Grandier's spiritual regeneration in the face of the unimaginable pain and death awaiting him. However, it is Vanessa Redgrave who truly inspires dread as Sister Jeanne of the Angels, the perverse, crook-backed, self-loathing yet narcissistically deluded mother superior who becomes violently infatuated with the priest. The most flamboyant of the villains is the grimly fanatical "professional witch-hunter," Father Barre (Michael Gothard), a young, athletic, wild-haired, hippie-Dionysus-type whose raving, crucifix-brandishing hysterics and seemingly insatiable fits of sadism grow repetitive and tiresome--not to mention silly--real fast. "The Devils"' climactic scene of Grandier's burning at the stake--in deliberate imitation of Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc"--might be the most horrible and graphically overwhelming cinematic immolation ever, but the brazenly sloppy staging and the underlying adolescent vulgarity of the whole conception renders it little more than shallowly sensationalistic on Russell's part. And the final elegiac image of Grandier's bereaved mistress climbing through the destroyed city walls and into the barren wastes beyond is certainly artfully bleak, yet it's also a somewhat pretentious, dispiriting "historical" nightmare with surprising little real insight.