Dos mujeres

very sad film by vittorio de sica (famed director of "the bicycle thief.") the first two thirds of the film move slowly, but it's still very engrossing. the final third of the film is pure cinematic tragedy. sophia loren won the oscar for best performance for a lead actress in this movie, and i beleive that she dearly deserved it. prior to seeing "two women" i had no idea what a terrific actress she was. her role as the mother desperately trying to shield her daughter from the horrors of the world is one of the finest that i have ever seen. this is a truly heartbreaking and beautiful film.

Very bad print (even on DVD), but very good movie. A war film that focuses more on the people who suffer, instead of telling the story of those fighting the battle. It's also a movie about love, relationship, bonding between a woman and her daughter. Sophia Loren's performance is stellar. Belmondo is also very good. Young Eleonora Brown's performance gets better during the film. The last 30 minutes of the movie are poignant. It's heartbreaking to listen to Cesira apologize to Rosetta. Watch it.

Seen at home, in Toronto, on February 19th, 2006.

81/100 (***)

It's WWII. Cesira (Sophia Loren) flees Rome away from the allied bombing for the sake of her 13 year old daughter Rosetta (Eleonora Brown). She's a widow of a loveless marriage and she's the object of everyman's desire. They go back to Cesira's home village. The idealistic anti-Fascist Michele Di Libero (Jean Paul Belmondo) falls for her. Mussolini is imprisoned and Michele is overjoyed. They even help a couple of English soldiers. The situation deteriorates as the war closes in and food becomes scarce. A group of Germans force Michele to lead them back to their lines. As the Americans approach, the villagers clear out. Cesira decides to go back to Rome on their own. They take shelter in a bombed out church where they are both raped by a large group of Arab soldiers.

Sophie Loren is magnetic. She powers every scene. Eleonora Brown does a good job keeping up. The story meanders a little. There are a lot of unrelated things that pop up. All of a sudden, there's a Russian deserter. The randomness sometimes help the story. When the story moves to the German occupied town, it really starts to move. The tension gets ratcheted up higher and higher.

Sophia Loren, aside from being one of the most sumptuously sexy women I have ever seen, proves herself here to be a tremendous actress. She has a melodramatic Italian flair that impassions her lovably aggressive character, a widowed shopkeeper in Rome during the Allied bombing in WWII, who flees with her beloved daughter to her impoverish mountainous native region. Throughout the story, she proves to be a strong woman, seasoned by pain and not having lost the fire and fight in her.

Like many European films of its time, Two Women is all about the characters and the current on which they flow through the film, a realistic capsule of a time and place. Vittorio De Sica, who made the beautifully small-scale film The Bicycle Thief, which is about a relationship between father and son, forms a companion piece with Two Women, which is about a relationship between mother and daughter. He addresses strikingly the unbearable love between a parent and their child.

Truly one of the greatest Italian films, this is an absorbing, emotional, modest journey with wonderful music; coarse, down-to-earth cinematography from the wonderful old days of gritty film prints and old school hands-on editing; incredible acting not only from Loren but from the young actress playing her daughter, who drastically transforms; and also from Jean- Paul Belmondo, who convincingly plays completely against type; and a beautifully emotional final shot. For those who feel detached from older foreign films, especially neo-realist, I have yet to see an Italian neo-realist film any more alive than this one!

A unique film about the ravages of World War II, told specifically from the point of view of an Italian woman and her young daughter.

The woman is Sophia Loren, and she won the first ever Oscar given for a foreign language performance in this film. She plays Cesira, a spitfire who is blithely indifferent to Italy's role in the war until the horrors of it hit home in deeply personal ways when she and her daughter leave bomb-addled Rome to trek across the Italian countryside to wait out the fighting. Most WWII films are told from the point of view of the men in combat or the women who wait at home patiently for them, letting their commitment to the cause be their solace. Few films are told from the point of view of women on the wrong side of the conflict (as we've been taught) who don't much care who wins or loses as long as their lives are left untouched. One would be justified in thinking that Loren's character is either selfish or naive, or both, but one would have to be inhuman not to feel compassion for what happens to her and her daughter.

Loren was known as nothing but a sex kitten at the time of this film's release, and director Vittorio De Sica uses this to his advantage. Her Cesira is a woman who's used to being alluring to men and isn't above wielding her sexuality when it might work to her advantage. But Loren goes far beyond sex kitten in this film, to something nuanced and ultimately heartbreaking.

Grade: A