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"A great film . . . SANDRA seems to me to be Visconti's best film, in fact, since SENSO" (Richard Roud). Though it won several awards, including the top prize at the Venice film festival, and is considered one of Visconti's supreme achievements, SANDRA is still very little known. In the decrepit splendour of an Etruscan city, an aristocratic family reunites to dedicate a garden to the memory of their patriarch. Convinced that their mother denounced their Jewish father to the Nazis and was responsible for his deportation to Auschwitz, Sandra (Claudia Cardinale, never more ravishing) and her brother (Jean Sorel) are forced to confront several guilty family secrets. Visconti masterfully interweaves themes of memory and myth in this "complex, beautiful, baroque film about guilt and incest, a modern version of the Elektra legend" (National Film Theatre). SANDRA was judged "unhealthy" by the Catholic Film Centre for its ambiguous and weak characters and its morbidity. "Here, as elsewhere, Visconti approaches more than any other modern director the silent film poetry of Murnau and Stroheim" (Phillip Lopate).
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