Girl with a Suitcase

Girl with a Suitcase (La ragazza con la valigia, 1961) is Valerio Zurlini's Italian melodrama you can watch online on iFILM. A nightclub singer named Aida is dumped on the roadside by a rich playboy who promised to make her a star; tracking him down, she meets his sixteen-year-old brother instead.

Aida is older, worn down by men who lie to her as a habit. Lorenzo is the opposite — a sheltered, bookish boy from a wealthy Parma family seeing a woman from another world for the first time. He defends her, looks after her, falls for her, and grows up in the span of a few days. She has no idea what to do with tenderness she's never been shown. Claudia Cardinale, early in her career, makes Aida vulnerable and real without a drop of sentiment in the playing.

Zurlini isn't filming a romance so much as the gap between two people who can never quite meet: age, class and experience all stand in the way. This black-and-white film is held up as one of the high points of Italian melodrama of its era, and it still breaks hearts more quietly and honestly than louder modern dramas. Stream Girl with a Suitcase (1961) online on iFILM.