In the first half of Girl with a Suitcase, 16-year-old Lorenzo (Jacques Perrin) looks after the showgirl, Aida (Claudia Cardinale), whom his older brother, Marcello (Corrado Pani), promised to help before cruelly and casually ditching her during a road trip. Unaware that Lorenzo is Marcello’s little brother, Aida accepts his kindness at face value, knowing that doing so may cause him to become emotionally attached to her, but, exhausted and embittered, she can’t resist the reprieve of a young man actually treating her with warmth and tenderness.
Throughout Girl with a Suitcase, the filmmakers use an array of wide shots to elucidate the feelings of alienation and isolation that grip the characters by surrounding them with negative space, and in settings ranging from the immense rooms in Lorenzo’s parents’ mansion to sparsely populated seaside locales. Via meticulous compositions and Perrin and Cardinale’s empathetic performances, the film presents its central characters as complicated, even contradictory individuals struggling to navigate the divides of class and gender.
As Girl with a Suitcase proceeds, it brings other men into Aida’s orbit, each of whom has their own ideas about the young girl and what they want out of her. Among them is her ex-boyfriend, Piero (Gian Maria Volonté), who exploits her looks and singing talent for money, and Lorenzo’s priest and tutor (Romolo Valli), who scolds her by insinuating that she’s loose and interested in Lorenzo only because of his family’s money.
Lorenzo idolized Aida, but these men pigeonhole her in different ways, seeing her as a Madonna and whore rolled into one, helpless in her state of poverty and thus ripe for the picking. This, unsurprisingly, causes Lorenzo’s view of her to begin shifting, but the film, for all its sympathy for Aida, doesn’t see her as a victim. It recognizes her agency, and while it puts her mistreatment on fierce display, it also shows her occasionally exploiting her sexual appeal for her own gain.
No matter which direction Aida turns, she’s stripped of the ability to define herself by oppressive patriarchal forces that brand her as unworthy of compassion or even assistance. In fusing a character study with a coming-of-age melodrama, Girl with a Suitcase celebrates the power and necessity of human connection, especially as a means of withstanding the misogynistic social expectations put upon young men and the inevitable consequences they have on women without the wealth or familial connections to withstand them.
Image/Sound
Radiance Films has transferred a 4K restoration of Girl with a Suitcase from the original camera negative by the Cineteca di Bologna and the results are nothing short of stunning. The strong contrast ratio impresses throughout, as evidenced by the wide range of grays in the magic-hour shots and the deep blacks in the nighttime party sequence; the image is startlingly clear, and without diminishing the presence of film grain. The textural details of faces, locales, and the titular, beat-up suitcase are a consistent marvel to behold. No less strong is the mono audio, namely for its presentation of the soundtrack’s many pop songs and the subtle sounds of Parma and the seaside locale in which much of the film takes place.
Extras
In a new video essay, critic Kat Ellinger covers the rise of neorealism in Italy after World War II and how many Italian dramas in the 1950s and ’60s couched social satire beneath slick aesthetic surfaces. She also expertly breaks down how Girl with a Suitcase deals with class tensions and gender norms. The disc also includes archival interviews from 2006 with assistant director Piero Schivazappa, screenwriter Piero De Bernardi, and film critic Bruno Torri. Schivazappa and De Bernardi talk about director Valerio Zurlini’s confidence and perfectionism on set, while Torri touches on the director’s early documentaries and recurring themes across his work. Rounding out the package is a quite beautiful 35-page booklet with essays by Giuliana Minghelli and Cullen Callagher, who write eloquently about the film’s reception in America and how Zurlini played with and undermined melodramatic expectations.
Overall
Radiance’s release of Girl with a Suitcase finally provides North American audiences with a missing link between Italian neorealism and the early-’60s films of Michelangelo Antonioni.
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