The Girl with a Suitcase

With this film, Claudia Cardinale etched her wistful, playful character whose edge comes from the reality that she never knows where her next meal is coming from. Aida, a showgirl, is seduced away from her act by a playboy aristocrat, Marcello, and then quickly abandoned. She pathetically tries to locate Marcello in his Parma villa, only to become the object of fascination and finally love for his sixteen-year-old brother Lorenzo (Jacques Perrin). Taking Aida under his wing, Lorenzo sees her poverty as a wealth, her mysterious needs as a gate out of his motherless life in the mansion he is destined to inherit. A moving, honest study of adolescence and class, Girl with a Suitcase is shot against the classic beauty of Parma contrasted with the visually spontaneous and socially chaotic sands of Rimini. Zurlini uses the precise elegance of settings and camera set-ups to explore the architecture of human relationships. Look for the characters in the spaces between the actors.

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