256 SEPTEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
W
hen we first see her, she’s a
blur, moving back and forth
behind a chain-link fence.
Then the camera pulls back,
revealing a young woman, lithe and blonde,
playing tennis but only half-seriously, in a
white dress with red piping. We are in Ferrara;
it is 1938, and though Italy has been Fascist
for more than a decade, Mussolini’s recent
alliance with Hitler has brought new racial
laws to the formerly tolerant country. Italian
Jews—a tiny and, for the most part, highly
assimilated minority—are suddenly excluded
from holding office or attending public
school; their books are banned; they can no
longer marry non-Jews or even employ them
as servants.
The local tennis club also expels them. So
Micòl Finzi-Contini, the girl in the white
dress, and her brother, Alberto—Jewish aristocrats who have
always kept themselves a bit apart from the local community—
open the gates of their family’s lush estate for the first time to a
small band of young people, both Jews and others, who join
them there for tennis parties on summer afternoons.
Italian director Vittorio De Sica’s classic film The Garden of the
Finzi-Continis—based on the brilliant semiautobiographical novel
by Giorgio Bassani—stars Dominique Sanda, an actor fetishized
by 1970s European auteurs and whose appeal riveted art-house
audiences across the world. (Delicate, fey Helmut Berger—the
love object of an entire lost generation—plays her adored
younger brother, Alberto.) In 1971, Vogue declared Sanda “as
desired as Monroe, as enigmatic as Garbo, as blunt as Hepburn,
as individual as Bernhardt.”The Garden of the Finzi-Continis won
the Oscar for Best Foreign Language
Film in 1971, but I must have seen it
more than a decade later, at a college
film-society screening. My boyfriend at
the time, a graduate student in English
literature, was obsessed with Sanda.
(He’d leave me a year later for his undergraduate sweetheart, a
wispy blonde who he claimed vaguely resembled his on-screen idol.)
Sanda had an elongated dancer’s torso and a preternatural,
almost animal grace, clear, intelligent blue eyes, and an intriguing
softness around her mouth that made her appear at once yielding
and inaccessible. Yet it was not just her beauty, remarkable though
it was, that moved me. There was also her voice,TRUE BLUE
HER GRACE AND
SPIRIT CAPTIVATED
ART-HOUSE AUDIENCES.
DOMINIQUE SANDA,
NEW YORK, JULY 10, 1971.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY
RICHARD AVEDON.
Gardenof LifeThe rise of anti-Semitism sent
Leslie Camhi back to a beloved
film in which actor Dominique
Sanda played a paragon of
elegance, tolerance, and pride.Nostalg ia