Girl with a Suitcase (1961)
Lorenzo, who's 16 and born to a wealthy family in Parma, tries to make things right toward a showgirl, Aida, whom his older brother has mistreated. In extending kindness and standing up for her, he comes of age. But, is there anything he can do that will alter Aida's situation or her prospects?
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My fourth Valerio Zurlini. On the surface, this might seem like a "coming of age" teenage boy meets a slightly older girl story. But it's much more than that. It turns into a sad and bitter tale about how easily a beautiful girl born into poverty is exploited by men. Even the poignant interval with a lovestruck boy cannot alter her circumstances or life trajectory.

The boy, 16 year old Lorenzo (Jacques Perrin) is from a wealthy aristocratic family in Parma. His crush is on Aida (Claudia Cardinale), a young woman his older brother basically seduced with big promises and then abandoned in a garage with her suitcase. Lorenzo's attraction to her and his genuine desire to help her opens…

This is the the third film I watched from Zurlini and he is truly underappreciated among Italian filmmakers. His vision of masculinity, his choice of actors and the way he depicts his melacholic world is really unique. This film from its start fascinates me and the way he approaches his characters is intriguing.

zurlini organizes a series of melodramatic mannerisms in a film of wonderful cinematography to conceive a beautifully staged coming of age film (he seems more interested in developing his main character’s reactions and personal growth rather than go deeply into cardinale’s character or accuse whatever injustices might have been done towards her, those more relevant as a plot progression tool allowing the film to arrive into the story of naive love it intends to work later on).

I really love how Valerio Zurlini uses music both in Girl with a Suitcase and Violent Summer, which I watched a few days ago. Not only do I like his taste, but Girl with a Suitcase has a beautiful score and an excellent theme music motif running throughout. I also loved Cardinale and Perrin in the lead roles, and the set design for the Fainardi mansion was stunning.

I think one reason I didn't like this more (but still appreciated it!) was that I just didn't have a particular interest in the story. I've been aware of this movie for a good 10 months but I have never wanted to watch it. The only reason I did is because when…

Nuanced to the point of mannerism, and I wasn't able to engage closely with it until the end of Act Two; the plot seems to revolve around an ambivalent attitude toward "the girl," who tries to be a decent human being while the men around her invariably put her in a box labeled "whore." Her internal conflicts - struggling against the confines of that category while she also acquiesces to it and behaves accordingly - seem to be the most interesting thing about the movie. There's a whiff of misogyny there, with the script seeming to attach too much importance to evaluating how much of a "whore" she actually is/isn't, but that may only be in the service of critiquing the men who insist on putting her in that category... and as a work of art, one does it a disservice by insisting on reductive political binaries.

The cinematography is a thing of absolute glory.