Francesca e Nunziata

This is a lavish (by TV standards) production from Italy starring Sophia (Sofia) Loren who is still as elegant and beautiful as she ever was (in most scenes, anyway).

It's a story of overpowering love and is brilliantly conceived and produced.

The story opens at the turn of the last century when Princess Sophia and her prince visit an orphanage to adopt a little girl to honour a pledge made to the Virgin Mary when their baby was sick.

The Prince is a waster but Loren makes pasta for export to the Americas and keeps the family of 10 in spending money.

The adopted girl turns out to be very smart and clever except that she falls in love with one of her adoptive brothers.

When Sophia mortgages her business so the Prince can become a banker they lose everything and the Prince attempts suicide.

In the end it is the orphan who replaces her adoptive mother but she has married one of the workers in the factory and given up her true love.

I saw this with an Italian friend who was struck by the stilted speech, which she said was obviously deliberate. My hope is that Lina Wertmüller's characters spoke, as would have been apt, like people in a Jack Vance novel, but I wouldn't know, since none of the stylised quality of her dialogue, whatever that quality was, came across in the English subtitles. For better or worse English speakers will see a more ordinary movie than the one Wertmüller made.

It's not bad even in its ordinary form. The deep focus, Academy ratio photography is excellent. It looks very much like a Hollywood film from the late 1940s with the same plot would have looked had such films been in colour. And without the one or two touches of nudity such a film could easily have been made then: a brisk saga of commerce, passion, honour, loyalty and grudges, high-flung yet easy to take seriously enough to care about the characters; it's the kind of thing which (especially in 1940s movies) gets called "melodrama" even though there MUST be a better word for it, since it really has nothing in common with the musty, overacted theatre pieces to which the term was originally applied.

After an enjoyable two hours you sort of wonder whether there's any point to the story other than the sequence of events of which it consists, or not. But this is less of a serious worry with this film than it was with, say, "Mildred Pierce".

Sophia Loren - countess and boss of pasta factory. Culture and history against business and making money. Tradition and higher class against normal people. Nicely photographed, good actors and little bit to long (122 min.), but worthy to see.

I just finished watching this movie. I always loved Lina Wermüller movies. A fantastic director. Her fantasy is out of this world. And this movie is as good or better than her previous ones.

Everybody plays her or his character to perfection. Sophia Loren, a master in her profession, superb, as usual. Raoul Bove, a beauty so ravishing that it's almost impossible to think that he actually is a regular human being, what a face!! And the color of people's eyes..., unreal.

I was struck, when in Naples, by the beauty of its people, and especially by the color of their eyes..., I wonder if the color of that fantastic sea has something to do with the color of Neapolitan eyes...

The story is so very well constructed that there are no fissures for criticisms.

Totally absorbent.

Spoken mostly in the Neapolitan dialect, a language that because of its voluptuousness makes it one of the most sensuous languages in the world, it gives the action a believability impossible to get with any other language. One regrets the thought -- while watching it-- that this film could eventually end.

The setting --Naples-- is out of this world, the interiors, as all the interiors of the upper classes in Italy, exquisite. Exquisite to the point of faintness.

The costumes, superb. Nature, outrageously green and fabulous. The music, as exquisite as the interiors, the classic music and the incredibly beautiful and nostalgic Neapolitan songs of the time, compliment their respective scenes to perfection.

Excellent the development of the young love and the unexpected ramifications of its passion. The different stories make one think also, that many times, marriages contracted as business, end up as a more satisfying experience --in the long run-- that the ones contracted by sheer love.

In the past --at the time of this movie, for example-- people knew this and most of the time marriages took place to reinforce a fortune with the addition of another fortune. As the Duchess of Windsor once said: "You can never be too thin or too rich", and she was the walking proof of that formula (although there is some gossip that swears that she was a man).

No matter, the formula remains the same. So. I think it's obvious that I LIKED this movie. See it yourself and make your own conclusions.