Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (Sandra). 1965. Italy. Directed by Luchino Visconti. Screenplay by Visconti, Enrico Medioli, Suso Cecchi d’Amico. With Claudia Cardinale, Jean Sorel, Michael Craig. 4K restoration courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. In Italian; English subtitles. 105 min.
Family secrets and wounds are exposed when Sandra Dawson (Claudia Cardinale) returns to her ancestral home in the walled Tuscan village of Volterra to commemorate a garden in memory of her Jewish father, a scientist who died in Auschwitz. The third of Cardinale’s collaborations with Luchino Visconti (after Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard), Sandra depicts themes of wartime crimes and betrayal, and the place of Jews in Italian history and society, that Vittorio De Sica would confront five years later in his better-known Garden of the Finzi-Continis. But Visconti’s fascination with the decadent collapse of Italy’s aristocratic past, here echoing Aeschylus’s ancient Greek tragic cycle The Oresteia, makes Sandra the more morally ambiguous and operatic of the two.