GIRL WITH A SUITCASE

Karina Gubanenko
2 min readJan 25, 2018

The film by Valerio Zurlini

It’s a pity that in the school curriculum there is still no art history or cinematography. A noisy class comes, takes out notebooks, the teacher turns on the projector, showing the masterpiece of Zurlini. The main thing, of course, that teacher should not be a PE teacher.

Girl with a suitcase (1961)
I will try not to spoil it. The story is about the growing up of aristocratic young man Lorenzo, a high school student by age.
Lorenzo falls in love with Aida from the province. Aida combines childishness and open beauty of a woman. She desires to snatch her piece of happiness.
There is a feeling that deep down Aida understands that she will never win a “lottery”, but is constantly deceived by hopes, confusing with different mens.

Aida represents things, that Lorenzo has not encountered yet. More precisely, he may have encountered, donated money to the needy, but has not touched, hasn’t let through so deeply a real life, hasn’t watched it so closely.

The beginning and end of the way of Lorenzo’s growing up are the scenes with the giving of “letters” to Aida. In the beginning, Lorenzo wants to help Aida with money, hands her an envelope. Without expecting such an act, Aida mistakenly accepts the envelope for the letter. Lorenzo responds without concealment, that this is just money. Aida refuses.

In the last scene of the film, Lorenzo again holds out the envelope to Aida. But already says that this letter. Aida understands that this is money and takes an envelope. She is so simpler, more accustomed to being deceived. And pure in heart, Lorenzo commits deception.

Lorenzo experiences several first feelings of youth: love, jealousy, deception, disappointment, the ability to stand up for oneself. And this is almost the sequence of scenes.
The story is good.

About Zurlini

At the Faculty of Law, Zurlini staged performances on the stage of the university. Then was a couple of non-standard for the post-war time, short films that broke the templates.
Peak of creativity — 10 feature films. Zurlini shared the “Golden Lion” with Tarkovsky for the adaptation of the novel “Family Chronicles” (a film that he always dreamed about).
He committed suicide at the age of 56 in a hotel in Verona, died in poverty. He was a connoisseur of art, had Morandi’s canvases, which he then gave to friends.

“Call people to noble feelings. This is the most important task,
standing today before art.”
V. Zurlini

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