BRIEF VACATION (UNA VACANZA BREVE)
Italy, 1073, 112 minutes, Colour.
Florinda Bolkan, Renato Salvatori.
Directed by Vittorio de Sica.
Brief Vacation is Vittoria De Sica's second last film (the last was The Voyage). It was written by Cesare Zavatini, a longtime collaborator . In the 1940s and 1950s they made such classics as Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine, Umberto D. The present filmis a product of old age and the love story trends of 1970s.
Some audiences might think this too much of a fairy tale, too good to be true. The heroine, a peasant from the South working in a Milanese factory, has to go to a sanatorium where she discovers life is not the ugly grind that she has become used to. She realises that people are not the narrow, clinging types that her over-dependent family are. Florinda Bolkan is excellent as the heroine, dignified in her old world inarticulateness, grateful for what she is discovering.
1. How enjoyable and engaging a fi1m? For what audience was it made? Its special appeal to feminine audiences? Its understanding of women? The song, ‘Stay’? The contrast between the dinginess of Milan and the Alpine scenery?
2. Critics said that the film was a modern fairy-tale and tended to dismiss it as unreal. How real were the people and their lives? Were they presented realistically? The details of factory life, home life, the sanatorium?
3. Audience response to the life of poverty and of continual hard work? Clara and her husband and his treatment, the in-laws, brother-in law as a thug, the mother-in-law and her criticisms, the children, the basement, the factory and hard work?
4. How attractive a character was the heroine? Response to the detai1 of her day? The response of the family? How did she stand it?
5. The discovery of her illness? The impact on her and the family? The patient at the medical centre, his reappearance at the sanatorium? The journey of discovery about 1ife and that it can be happy? What did she experience at the sanatorium - beauty, friendship, understanding, love? Audience reaction when the family arrived to visit her?
6. How much insight was there in the presentation of the other patients? The rich, the hysterical, the dying?
7. How real were the elements in her decision to leave the sanatorium and return home? After the affair? Did she make the right - decision? The influence of this vacation on the rest of her life?
