Girl with a Suitcase

With this film, Claudia Cardinale etched a 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 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 was shot against the classic beauty of Parma, contrasted with the visually spontaneous and socially chaotic sands of Rimini. Valerio Zurlini uses the precise elegance of settings and camera setups to explore the architecture of human relationships. Look for the characters in the spaces between the actors.

—Judy Bloch

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