OVP: Two Women (1961)

Film: Two Women (1961)
Stars: Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Eleanora Brown

Director: Vittorio de Sica

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Actress-Sophia Loren*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Sophia Loren-click here to learn more about Ms. Loren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned last week, we're going to spend the remainder of our time with Sophia Loren in her native tongue of Italian.  While Loren would continue making films in English for the rest of her career (and indeed, even made Nine not that long ago), the bulk of the most important work of her career was made in Italian.  That she was able to stay a proper international movie star may have had something to do with the movie we're going to discuss today, which is historic in our entire season on Sex Symbols.  While we have had actresses who were met with acclaim (both in their time and later) and have had people like Marilyn Monroe & Jayne Mansfield who have won Golden Globes, we have never had an actress in this series who had been nominated for an Academy Award, let alone had won one (and indeed, Loren will be the only Oscar winner in our series this year).  This marks a question mark over whether or not she should be included at all-this is a series focused on women whose careers were marked by not just their incredible beauty, but also that that beauty frequently overshadowed the actual content of their work.  With an Oscar, Loren certainly received the top accolade in her industry, and thus respect in a way that none of the other women in this season ever did.

But if you think of Loren today, it's not in the context of her films, but in the context of her beauty and in particular her physique.  More than Elizabeth Taylor, more than Grace Kelly, more than Joan Crawford (all women of their eras whose onscreen beauty was synonymous with their personas), Loren never really escaped the sex symbol trappings, though she redefined them, and never had a role that would be as iconic as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf or Rear Window or Mildred Pierce that would make her connected to a movie rather than her public persona.  The question that should be asked here is "why?"  Why doesn't Two Women have the sort of stature to be able to keep Loren from being treated as a serious actress in contemporary discussions of her work, rather than the earth goddess sex symbol she's so often commented as.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place at the tail end of World War II, where Cesira (Loren) is a widowed shopkeeper living with her 12-year-old daughter Rosetta (Brown) in Rome.  Afraid of the bombings and the attacks on her shop, she leaves the city, setting off to the city of her youth, where she can live with her family.  Along the way, she and her daughter face hardship and hunger, as well as the imploding politics of Mussolini's Italy, as the Italians are clearly about to lose the war.  When they get to this city, they find themselves living in a barn, and befriended by a local communist named Michele (Belmondo).  Cesira falls in love with him, in her own way, as does he, but when a group of German soldiers take him prisoner (and we learn later, kill him), Cesira leaves with her daughter back for Rome, hoping for a saner life in the city.

This is when the movie's most famous and staggering scene takes place.  Cesira & Rosetta are attacked and gang-raped in a church by a group of Moroccan soldiers.  It is, considering the film's release in the early 1960's (in some countries in 1960, others in 1961), pretty graphic.  We obviously don't see a large amount of nudity (though there is a woman's bare breast shown in a much earlier moment in the film), but the violence is pretty graphic.  You see the horrified looks on both women's faces, and it's something that even by modern standards feels truly horrifying.  The scene carries weight for the rest of the film as Rosetta starts to defy her mother and act out, before the final scene where she emotionally lets go of the pain she's carrying and cries in her mother's arms, finally getting to behave like the younger girl we met at the beginning of the film.

The movie is rough, and unfathomably sad.  It's hard to sometimes tell with a movie this depressing if it's good or if it's just serious.  What certainly can be taken away is that Loren is excellent in this movie.  Despite being too young for the part (it was originally supposed to have Anna Magnani cast in the main role, who would have been twice Loren's age at the time), Loren never feels miscast as the mother, carrying a weight to her performance of a woman who has lived enough for a dozen lifetimes.  She plays Cesira as Mt. Everest, a woman who cannot be moved by pretty much anything, but we see the cracks in her demeanor as the movie wears on, we see more of the soft, vulnerable woman who sleeps with her married lover in the film's opening scenes.  Loren's work here isn't as immortally chic as Audrey Hepburn's in Breakfast at Tiffany's nor as complicated as what Natalie Wood is doing in Splendor in the Grass, but it's a bravura performance and it's easy to see why this was the movie that finally won a performer an Oscar in a foreign-language, even though it's not a good enough film to become Loren's signature work.  Next week we'll continue our look at the way Loren used the momentum of the Oscar win in her career.