Girl With A Suitcase is a 1961 black and white drama directed by Bologna-born Valerio Zurlini.  It is presented here in a crisp restored version from Radiance in a limited edition of three thousand copies.

Usually when we talk about critical rediscovery, we mean the belated praise and serious commentary afforded to toilers in previously overlooked areas of cinema such as Jack Arnold, Terence Fisher or Lucio Fulci.

Zurlini is a rather different case.  Originally well-liked by critics, his 1962 Family Diary won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and his 1965 The Camp Followers won the Special Silver Prize at the 4^th Moscow International Film Festival.

However, partly since he wasn’t closely affiliated with a fashionable aesthetic or artistic movement, Zurlini subsequently fell into critical and audience disfavour.  It may be a case of actual critical rediscovery rather than discovery when, in the 2000s, Italian cult video label NoShame Films issued Girl with a Suitcase and two other titles.  This and various well-received retrospectives helped prompt reappraisal and increase his profile.

Although Girl with a Suitcase does not claim to make any great statements about class, it is all there in the background.  When we first meet our heroine Aida (Claudia Cardinale) as she leaves the flashy sports car of her boyfriend Marcello (Corrado Pani) to go for a leak, we know something is amiss.  Marcello attempts to strand her and her suitcase in the middle of nowhere, but thinks better of it due to a lack of time. Although he insults Aida to others, calling her a “moron” among other epithets, it may be just that he considers her too low born for his well to do family.  When Aida eventually meets Marcello’s adolescent brother Lorenzo at the family villa (although he hides his sibling status from her) it is the aristocratic surroundings that convince Aida he has the wherewithal to help her track down Marcello.

The film is also, despite Lorenzo’s duplicity, a touching look at first love.  Lorenzo is 16, a child almost on the cusp of manhood.  Aida is a woman old enough to have had a child during the war.  Their relationship is, of course, hopeless, but Lorenzo is so smitten he continues to do her ‘favours’ and Aida takes his affection as evidence of fondness.

With its reliance on dialogue, a rather subtle social critique and the interplay between relationships and social background Girl with a Suitcase is rather reminiscent of the British New Wave of Woodfall Films ( Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961) et al).

The film also runs to nice bits of business that are not based in any brand of social realism.  Lorenzo plays arias from Verdi’s ‘Aida’ on his record player while our Aida descends a staircase, her hair wrapped in a striped towel, making her look very much like an ancient Egyptian in the opera.

The leads are both engaging.  When we first see Cardinale, she is wearing a high-waisted pleated skirt, bringing Bridget Bardot to mind, a liberatory female icon of the time and therefore an indicator of Aida’s own, albeit flawed, independence.  As Lorenzo, the frequent future collaborator with Zurlini Jacques Perrin in different ways resembles Jean-Pierre Leaud and Terence Stamp and shares some of the intensity of both actors.

The extras on this Radiance Blu-ray mostly consist of under 20 minutes featurettes drawn from the NoShame DVD release of 2006.  The first has assistant director Piero Schivazappa discuss his experiences making Girl with a Suitcase with director Valerio Zurlini.  The second has screenwriter Piero De Bernardi discuss his creative history with Zurlini, which culminated with Girl with a Suitcase. The third and final NoShame featurette has distinguished Italian critic Bruno Torri discuss Zurlini’s output and attempts to contextualize it in the Italian Cinema of the time.

A final short featurette (14 mins) made exclusively for Radiance in January 2025 has critic and filmmaker Kat Ellinger provide further comments about Girl with a Suitcase’s place in Italian Cinema and discuss the themes at play in the film. These featurettes all provide context and interesting details to an already excellent package.

With this release, Radiance have made another worthwhile release available to English-speaking audiences through their Italian collaborators.