Comencini transforms a job-for-hire (an adaptation of a classic weepie of late nineteenth century English literature) into a subtle and highly personal film that, together with the first part of Giacomo Casanova: Childhood and Adolescence, marks the beginning of a major new phase in his career, of films about children. The director creates a “sort of world apart, disconnected from everyday matters and protected from external reality, in which the only visible influences are psychological in nature … It is a universe in which the children’s solitude is palpable, almost measurable (the long corridors and rooms are often deserted, the tree-lined paths of the garden hide the children from their nanny’s eyes), and which ends up making the psychological problems of the two young protagonists even more evident and piercing. At its core, Comencini entrusts the narrative structure and generation of emotions to the confrontation/conflict between two periods of youth (pre-moral childish innocence and the more socialised and responsible early adolescence) and both the children’s and the viewer’s discovery of the insensibility (or different sensibility) of the adult world … The film develops by juxtaposing apparently disparate scenes, ignoring the links that other directors would have carefully made explicit but which Comencini intentionally eliminates … It is almost as if the director were trying to emulate a child’s gaze: more emotional than didactic, more reactive than properly explanatory (narrative).”

(Paolo Mereghetti, in Luigi Comencini. Il cinema e i film, edited by Adriano Aprà, Marsilio, Venice 2007).