LOOKING BACK OVER Vittorio De Sica's career is to uncover a list of contradictions; a brave man and great filmmaker, or a genius at political compromise and a mediocre director, even a matinee idol or consummate actor. During the post-World War II decade in a battered, guiltridden Italy, he was in the vanguard of the New Realism, and thereby a prominent figure under attack by his country's outraged government, clergy and film critics. In critical circles outside Italy, his cinematic results were considered brilliant (Shoeshine, 1946; Bicycle Thief, 1948; Umberto D, 1950); the ensuing wrath he incurred because of these disturbing documents of the hopelessness of Italy's human environment was equally as strong.

But De Sica could also make less promising films. During the later 50's and 60's his art degenerated into trite moralistic statements that crossed the fine line between his somberly human neo-Realism and the more impersonal symbolism of documentaries-with-a-message. As for the Liberal Catholic and social critic, his heroic posturing proves something of an over-compensation for the remorse engendered by playing a confidence game of his own during the German Occupation.

It took even less courage to make his latest movie, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a film about the repression of Italian Jews prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Although a fine study in nostalgia, its import lies rather in having created an elegant and moving recapitulation of this shameful episode in Italy's history--thirty years too late. Painful though it may be for a man like De Sica to shoulder the burden of his country's guilt in making such an apology, the balance against sentimental but ineffective nostalgia is only preserved by the counter-weight of the triumphant re-emergence of De Sica's art.

ODDLY LINKED to his Bicycle Thief, because most of Italy seems to move at the slow, wobbly pace produced by riding on two wheels, it is clear, as a sporty group of young people comes swooping by in the opening shot, that De Sica is dealing here with the upper-classes, not the population of Rome's slums. Upon the invitation of the Jewish-aristocrat Finzi-Continis, they are on their way to play tennis on the courts in the family's garden. As they pedal through the gates they leave the real world behind. True to the De Sica tradition, the action for the most part takes place apart from developments like war outside the smaller universe of human emotions the director builds for his story. The tennis players, most of them Jews, are welcomed into the grounds because of their exclusion from the Ferrara tennis club under the new "Jewish laws." Their mood is carefree, nevertheless, and is echoed by that of their hosts, the blond ice-maiden Micol (Dominique Sanda), and her sickly brother Alberto (Helmut Berger). Among their guests are Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio), a childhood friend, and Malnate (Fabio Testi), a gentile visitor from Milan. Wrinkling her nose at Malnate's Fascist predilection for the workers of Ferrara, Micol returns his appraising once-over with "you're too much the industrious Lombard--besides, you're too hairy." Next to Malnate's animality, De Sica's aristocratic Jews are the ultimate wish-fulfillments to any Hitlerian dream of the perfect Aryan. Tall and fair-haired, they appear the descendents of some Nordic race, rather than the inheritors of a religion born on the Southern shore of the Mediterrancan.

IGNORING the Milanese playboy, Micol lavishes her attentions on Giorgio. As they stroll together through the garden, they people the woods and fields with remembrances of things past; glimpses of the two as children show Giorgio even then a shy admirer of the "private pupil" Micol, while she plays the seductress in their game of communication through glances. A sudden downpour dispells the sunshine of their memories, and taking refuge in an old carriage, their mode of contact threatens to become physical. But Giorgio is too slow in making this transition from childhood innocence. Paralyzed by the enticing new light in Micol's eyes, he can only stare back embarrassedly, until she runs away in disgust. And Micol never offers anything twice.

Realizing that a relationship between them is impossible, Micol flees the tardy growth of Giorgio's passion by going to Venice to finish her studies. De Sica allows Giorgio similar flirtations with escape, when things start to fall to pieces for him. Repeatedly rejected by Micol, he takes refuge both in his work, as well as in his attempt at a physical change of scene by visiting his brother at the politically aware and apprehensive University of Grenoble. No matter. De Sica always keeps his characters emotionally within the confines of the garden. Giorgio cannot avoid the unprecedented implications of his Jewishness. The seemingly petty anti-Semitic restrictions, that initially brought the group together in play, become so pervasive that Giorgio is even prohibited from completing his studies. "I know, I know," he remarks scathingly to the director who tries to apologize for expelling him from school, "all of Italy has a family." In his growing sense of persecution, he is forced to confront his identity as an Italian Jew; with the same sense of unfamiliarity De Sica has transformed an aristocratic garden of delights into a ghetto.

GIORGIO is not blind to the danger of remaining in such a tarnished paradise, but even the warning signals encountered abroad cannot argue with a set of emotions that are still back in the garden. He must follow the lines of action that form the framework of De Sica's subjectifying microcosm. These lines continue to bind his characters to the dual power of ethnic identity and omnipresent past. His young people run away and return, reject and make up, but the two dominant forces always narrow the scope of De Sica's drama to his claustrophobic universe, by holding all involved within the plot of the garden. Only here can they explore their common identities as Jews. Only here can they watch the ghosts of their pasts frolic through the haunts of childhood.

In Giorgio the struggle to break loose is intense, but his will-power finally breaks down, and late one night he climbs over the garden wall, only to find Micol and his friend Malnate asleep together in the garden-house, where he has spent so many happy hours, where he has spent so many happy hours. Malnate is drafted soon afterwards and sent off to die in Russia; the police pick up more and more Jews; finally they drive their black limousines over the bicycle paths of the garden of the Finzi-Continis. When they emerge again it is to carry the family to join the other Jewish townspeople in the schoolhouse of Ferrara, the first depot on their train ride to those "hotels in the woods, where instead of giving you a key to your room, they burn a number into your arm."

This invasion of the motorcade isn't the first encroachment from the outside upon the world behind the garden walls. Gradually the inhabitants and their guests have become less immune to ugly winds of change. Of the initial white-clad clique, only Alberto continues to wear that color. Confining himself to his bedroom he pines away between four walls, clutching a white bathrobe around him, and transforming his retreat into the sterile whiteness of a sick room, and finally a deathbed. Always a master of gestures. De Sica places Alberto's nervous submission in the clasp of his folded hands, a subtle pantomime that will be echoed later in the same gesture by people under arrest.

THE REAL PROOF of an all--too--worldly' morality lies in Dominique Sanda's Micol. Showing herself as an almost incestuous alter ego to Helmut Berger's Alberto, her cool beauty fails to mask a festering decadence that has been epitomized by Berger's own performances in Visconti's The Damned, and Bertollucci's The Conformist. While society is being corrupted outside the garden, the self-contained life-style perpetuated by the Finzi-Continis on the inside is rotting at the core. Raised as a bluestocking, Micol quips to Giorgio that she's writing her thesis on Emily Dickenson, "a dried-up spinster like me." Minutes later, in giving him a mock botany lesson, she points to a tree she imagines planted by Lucrezia Borgia. The connotations of that name reveal in her no dried-up spinster, but the malevolence of cruel sexuality. All her dewyeyed clinging to a golden past is merely the weapon she uses to emasculate Giorgio's overworshipful maleness at the altar of a bitchgoddess. Not only cold, she is consciously evil. Raising her eyes to meet Giorgio's tormented shock of recognition through the garden-house window, when he discovers her with Malnate, she stares back at him with the full meanness of her decayed sensibilities. With a magnificently erotic gesture, she tosses the shawl she had draped around herself over Malnate to cover his nakedness, exposing her own nudity with contemptuous defiance.

Only a stronger force of evil can stay Micol's own process of corruption from within. "The Finzi-Continis are not like us," Giorgio's father pleads with him earlier, "they don't even seem Jewish. That's what attracted you to her; she's so superior." Crouched behind a desk in a classroom crowded with Jews awaiting deportation, Micol is both humbled to the same level of humanity as those around her, and bound up with the fate of her people to an ironically larger degree than farseeing Giorgio, who has escaped from Italy with his mother and sister.

De Sica's realistically monotonous speed of progression is his film guides the action slowly from full minute to full minute. In a final sequence, however, De Sica rises almost to the surreal. To the swelling of a chanted exhortation to "Pray for all of us who fell at the hands of murderers in Dachau, Auschwitz and Treblinka...," De Sica leaves the scene of Micol's proud resignation to look one last time at the dome of Ferrara's synagogue, the implied emptiness beneath her tiled roofs, and a rusty padlock on the gate to the garden of the Finzi-Continis. With a camera eye that has treated two oranges on the luggage rack of a grimy train compartment with as much artistic respect as the baroque splendor of the castle's interior, De Sica lingers over flowerbeds choked with weeds, the crumbling bricks in a wall, the ramshackle remains of garden furniture. As the elegy in the background rises to its fullest intensity of sorrow, his ramble through dilapidation seems to stray upwards until brought to a halt before the wire fences of the concentration camps listed in the song. But as the wandering glance draws closer to this stronghold of destruction, the barracks and chimneys behind the mesh fail to materialize. We are still in the garden, and inside the wire fence stretches the empty expanse of the deserted tenniscourts. Giorgio's father had earlier labelled the garden for the ghetto it was, but its jungle-like desolation now excludes all habitation except by the memories of those De Sica has brought to life and led to death. Like Micol's breasts seen through the wet veil of her drenched tennis shirt, De Sica's method is one of powerful suggestiveness. A tennis court is a concentration camp is a playground for whatever mental visions the director's varying ideas project onto the screens of his audience's mind.

HE HAS OPENED up the garden of the Finzi-Continis for all to see a welter of anti-Semitism, decadence, human weakness and human love; an Italy where never a crucifix is seen, only a Star of David carved into the stone gate-post of a Jewish graveyard, or a Hebrew inscription above the doorway of an elegant townhouse. De Sica finally limits his characters to a world of their own subjectivity, leaving untapped a world beyond the area of Italy and deeper than the physical eye can see. His creative vision is undoubtedly capable of exploring the far reaches of such worlds, but in the Garden of the Finzi-Continis it tends to pirouette too prettily in one spot.