I girasoli (1970)

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A sunflower is always turning towards the sun and gains a death-like appearance when it's not there. And so does Sophia Loren in Vittorio De Sica's Sunflower, a woman who keeps looking for her husband (Marcello Mastroianni) after the war, believing him to still be alive somewhere in the USSR, unable to move on with her life. Seeing as he IS played by Mastroianni, you expect him to be, but flashbacks to their very brief courtship create a certain tension. Could this be all there is to the role? Whether she finds him a dead man or a changed one, she is probably heading for tragedy. As is other collaborations with De Sica, these two are a sexy, but also goofy couple, so the early comedy is appreciated. What we have here is a romantic ideal, but one dosed by reality. War is cruel, and so it time. Directorially, I quite like how De Sica evokes distance in his shots, a physical distance that relates to temporal and other kinds of distance. I will say, however, that I rarely buy that we're in the war or post-war era, especially when we're on location in Russia. The general style is way too 60s for that. 1 year 3 months ago