The Girl with a Suitcase

A moving study of social class and adolescence, Valerio Zurlini’s The Girl with a Suitcase stars Claudia Cardinale as a poor showgirl seduced by a wealthy playboy (Corrado Pani) and then promptly abandoned. Pursuing the cad to his family home in the country, she becomes involved with his passionate 16-year-old brother (Jacques Perrin, in the first of many roles he played for Zurlini), who sees in her the antidote to the bourgeois life he is about to inherit. "The liaison between an adolescent and an older woman is more than a constant theme of Zurlini’s: it is profoundly revealing of the romantic sufferings of people incapable of imagining the perversity of others, and condemned to suffer it" (Marcel Oms, Rimini et le cinema). "Zurlini, one of the most sensitive, economical and visually aware of Italian directors of the period, has made a poignant film of some depth...Cardinale and Perrin are excellent" (Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide). "Perrin and Cardinale achieve a beautiful rapport as two loners from different worlds who are drawn to each other. Zurlini’s poignant film made Cardinale a star" (Elliott Stein, Village Voice). B& W, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 103 mins.