Giorni d’amore

Giorni d’amore is a charming and lively and vivacious and gracious and talented picture. It seems hardly surprising that it should have picked up three or four international prizes between 1954 and 1955. The director, Giuseppe De Santis, is currently one of Italy’s best directors. […] De Santis most prominent quality is undoubtedly an acute sense of popular story-telling. He knows how to drive a story with passion so that it can touch a very broad range of audiences. […] This sense of popular narrative is what makes Giorni d’amore a perfectly delightful little fable. Its plot affords easy, enthusiastic entertainment, as does the versatile Marina Vlady’s youth and beauty. Comedy and poetry combine here to weave a pattern that makes this provincial tale indubitably Italian […]. The subject cannot fail to move, not because it is picturesque but because it is universal. Fondi (Latina), after all, is not the only place where ‘children in love’, who want to be and live together, find themselves confronting insuperable problems, a profound tragedy offset here by cheerful and witty storytelling. All the same, these lovers are not from just anywhere. Their adventures are rooted in social observation, even more than in place, and they offer a colourful, exact description of Southern Italian peasant life. Choosing such very real subject-matter and treating it realistically in no way excludes stylistic experiment or lyricism. In many scenes, notably those involving family quarrels, De Santis has gone for a certain degree of theatricality in the way he shows supporting characters, as also in the way he has cut the picture and directed it. This approach emphasizes the intentional commedia dell’arte style of his approach, though the love story prop er is shown in a highly lyrical manner that maximizes its power. It ends in a fine, overwhelmingly sensual and pagan scene, in which the two young people finally come together by the sea. De Santis shows an exceptional gift for celebrating love of this sort in all its noble, carnal passion. For this scene alone, whatever its many other great qualities, the film deserves to be seen

Georges Sadoul, Un ardant conte d’amour, “Les Lettres françaises”, n. 597, 8-14 December 1955