Overview: Aida (Claudia Cardinale, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Day of the Owl) has fallen for a rich playboy and arrives at his door to find it firmly shut and herself ignored. His younger, more sensitive brother, Lorenzo (Jacques Perrin, Cinema Paradiso) helps her and finds himself quickly besotted.

Cardinale gives one of her most tender and vulnerable performances in Girl with a Suitcase, an unsentimental coming-of-age story that deals as much with adolescence as class. A vital director of Italy’s post-war cinema, Valerio Zurlini’s small but remarkable body of work deserves to be discussed among the greats.

Blu-ray Verdict: The story is uncomplicated: Perrin’s character falls for Claudia. She’s an adult, he’s not. She’s poor, he’s nobility.

Perrin’s understated performance is a dead-on portrait of adolescent longing. His eyes tell the whole story. It’s difficult to imagine that any man could watch him without experiencing flashbacks to his own adolescence. He doesn’t know whether to hope, or not, but he can’t help hoping anyway. He doesn’t know anything about adult courtship, so he improvises as he goes along. He’s unfailingly, achingly, kind and polite (see first clause, previous sentence). He’s brave, as he pushes against, and sometimes breaks, the rules that bind a young man not yet old enough to make his own rules.

Claudia, meanwhile, also provides a deeply thought performance, as a young woman whose poverty constrains her every move. She wants some tiny measure of security - her fear of the very real possibility of being out on the streets in palpable. She has no way to reach safety without depending on a man, but men have been awful to her. And she wants desperately not to cross the final line of degradation and become a whore!

She’ll take money, but only if she can satisfy herself that it is a gift - that is, only if she can feel that she still has some measure of choice in what happens next. Several men, including Perrin, are trying to help her. We see her hesitate, and calculate, in almost every conversation: trying to decide if the safety offered is real, calculating what she will have to give up if she accepts. Claudia is not in glamor mode here: she is beautiful, and the men are swarming around her, but her clothes are cheap, and she’s living out of her suitcase.

In conclusion, Girl With A Suitcase is a mighty fine film, but it’s not likely to be in anyone’s top ten. I think most people will find it moving and well worth watching, especially now as a wondrous 4K restoration and with oh-so many special features now included. [D.T.]

Bonus Features:
4K restoration of the film from the original camera negative by the Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Camelia and Titanus
Interview with assistant director Piero Schivazappa
Interview with screenwriter Piero De Bernard
Interview with film critic Bruno Torri on Zurlini’s career
Visual essay about the film by Kat Ellinger
Trailer
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Filippo Di Battista
Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Giuliana Minghelli

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