TWO WOMEN

Italy, 1961, 109 minutes, Black and white.

Sophia Loren, Eleanora Brown, Jean-Paul? Belmondo, Raf Vallone, Renato Salvatore.
Directed by Vittorio de Sica.

Two Women is probably Sophia Loren's best film. She won critical acclaim and became the first actress to win an Oscar for a performance in a foreign dialogue film. Her performance incorporates all the qualities and natural vigour of the peasant Italian mother and her character in this film is symbolic of an Italy and its depth in World War II, invaded by enemies and allies who were brutal to the Italians.

The film was directed by noted Italian director, Vittorio de Sica, so well known for his post-war classics - Shoeshine; Bicycle Thieves; Umberto D. He went on to direct Sophia Loren in Boccaccio 70 (1962); Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1964); Marriage - Italian Style (1965); Sunflower (1969). His Garden of the Finzi-Continis? (Oscar for Best Foreign Film, 1971) showed that he was still a fine film maker.

Two Women is very simple, dealing as it does with the fears, work, happiness, loves of ordinary people - the people on the sides of the roads cheering the troops in all those war films - and the everyday suffering as well as its brutality. The film presents violence in understatement rather than explicitly. One of the best Italian films for insight into the lives of human beings.

1. What is the significance of Two Women as a title? Is there a universality in these two women?

2. Did the film give a valid picture of Italy, Italian life qualities and values?

3. The film was set in a period and world of violence - how was this portrayed? Did the tendency to understatement help the impact of the film?

4. How does war change people's perspectives and lives?

5. What qualities were portrayed in the mother?

6. Would you describe Rosetta as a typical twelve year old girl? Why?

7. Why did they leave Rome? Should they have left?
8. How were they accepted at Santa Eufemia?

9. What was the significance of Michele in the film? Discuss the meaning and sadness of his death.

10. Contrast the quality of life in the country with Rome. Was it better there than in Rome?

11. Why was the rape sequence, though so reticent, so effective? How did the film prepare for this?

12. Discuss the reactions of to mother and daughter.

13. How important is the question of innocent suffering in this film, man's unnecessary inhumanity to man and the lessons of the victim who suffers?

14. How was the rape of mother and daughter a symbol of the savagery of the invaders on Italy?

15. How pessimistic was the film and its outlook on life and other people?

16. How much insight into the workings of human behaviour did the film offer?

17. How valuable a war film is this? How valuable a film for exploring the spirit of mankind?

18. Comment on De Sica's technical achievement in communicating his themes: the visual impact of Italy, Roman shops and streets, people in trains, country people and refugees, open-air meals, Bible-reading; the bombings - the man on the bicycle killed, the twittering of the birds and the ladybug after the strafing; Rosetta - weak heart condition, modesty, dependence on her mother; fascism - the brutal town fascists who fled, the pin-wearing relatives; Michele's readings and interpretation of Lazarus; sexuality -mother and daughter's talk about womanhood; the truck-driver; Rosetta's hardness after the rape, her weeping for Michele and this suffering breaking her of her bitterness.