La Ciociara

Vittorio De Sica (1960)

It was originally intended that Anna Magnani would play the lead in the screen adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s 1958 novel La Ciociara and that Sophia Loren would play her daughter.   Magnani had just turned fifty and Loren was in her mid-twenties but it seems Magnani was insulted to be considered old enough to play Loren’s mother.  She angrily suggested that Loren play Cesira, the older woman, herself and that’s what happened.   I haven’t read the Moravia novel and don’t know Cesira’s age in the book but it seems that Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, who wrote the screenplay, made her more youthful to accommodate Loren’s casting.  The film-makers certainly reduced the age of Cesira’s daughter:  Rosetta is a twelve-year-old schoolgirl – the same age as Eleonora Brown, who plays her.   Because Sophia Loren is such an imposing figure, she seems older than her twenty-six years.  At the same time, she’s young enough to make you feel Cesira’s fairly short life has been remarkably eventful:  a widow as well as a mother, she’s run a grocery shop in Rome until the Allied bombing raids on the city in 1943-44 force her and Rosetta to leave.   Making Rosetta a child rather than a young woman turns out to have different and problematic dramatic consequences.

For her performance in Two Women, Sophia Loren became the first actor to win an Academy Award for a role in a language other than English.  (Anna Magnani had also won the Best Actress Oscar, six years previously, but for her performance in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo.)   Loren pulls out all the stops; her emotional range and power are impressive; but, partly because she’s so formidable, I wasn’t moved by her character – in the well-staged, frightening air raid that opens the film, the tigerishly defiant Cesira has a bombproof quality.  A scene between her and Giovanni, the man she’s currently having a relationship with, is promising but we never see him (Raf Vallone) again.  Cesira and Elvira leave Rome and make their way, by train then on foot, to Ciociaria, the rural, mountainous region of Central Italy where Cesira was born and grew up.  Once Allied troops have ended the German occupation of Rome, mother and daughter set out on the return journey there.  From the point at which Cesira’s and Rosetta’s travels begin, Two Women turns into a succession of striking, sometimes melodramatic incidents, and the narrative is choppy.  The incidents may reflect the unpredictable dangers of a war zone; the unsettled movement of the story might seem to correspond to the chaotic aspects of the time and place – the uncertainty of who’s in charge in the period of transition from German to Allied control of Rome.  A more negative explanation is that the film’s lack of rhythm results from desperate attempts in the editing room to shape it dramatically.  Armando Trovajoli’s sensitive, varied score is a valiant attempt to support the narrative, to give it a balance of turbulence and nuance that’s lacking in Vittorio De Sica’s direction and the structure of Cesare Zavattini’s screenplay.

There are some relatively good sequences in Ciociaria.  The community life is well described and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s inclusion in it helps.  His voice dubbed into Italian, Belmondo isn’t obvious casting as Michele – an earnest, bespectacled young Marxist, who is principled and romantically inexperienced to a nearly comical degree.  Nevertheless, the quiet charisma (combined with, perhaps, a slight uncertainty) that Belmondo brings to the role is engaging.  The unresolved nature of Michele’s relationship with Cesira and of the effect he has on Rosetta supplies emotional life to their interactions.  I liked a scene in which Cesira gives a meal to two British soldiers, with Rosetta and Michele also at the dinner table.  Cesira drinks plenty of wine and Sophia Loren makes her tipsy sentimentality very amusing.  She toasts Giovanni, the Englishmen join in the toast but Michele asks, ‘Who’s Giovanni?’

Needless to say, this lighter-hearted interlude is hardly typical of the film.  The grimmest episode occurs about fifteen minutes before the end, when Cesira and Rosetta, on their trek back to Rome, rest in an empty church and are gang-raped there by Moroccan soldiers.  (They are part of the Allied forces – although they wear robes rather than Western military uniform, and this undoubtedly contributes to the presentation of them as an alien horde.)  The horror of this attack – particularly from the point of view of the chaste, devoutly religious Rosetta – is too great to be absorbed in what remains of the story:  the violation of the twelve-year-old child completely eclipses the later news of Michele’s murder by German soldiers.  And the aftermath to the rape is powerful in spite of an element that should detract from its power (but which adds to the discomfort of watching the last part of Two Women).  Eleonora Brown is a weak actress:  as a result, the traumatised, petrified Rosetta isn’t sufficiently different from the inexpressive girl we’ve been watching up to this point – even though we realise intellectually that she has been profoundly changed.

The film ends with a long-held shot of the mother cradling the daughter in her arms.  The image seems meant to crystallise Vittorio De Sica’s main intention – to describe the horrific effects of war, on two particular women.  (The outrage in the church has, in the most brutal sense, made a woman of Rosetta.)  All that stays in your mind, however, is Cesira’s furious exclamation after the rape – to a group of American soldiers and within the child’s hearing – ‘Look at my daughter – she’s ruined forever!’   You really do feel the assault on Rosetta is an irredeemable event:  the plot synopsis of Moravia’s novel on Wikipedia indicates that the rape ‘so embitters Rosetta that she falls numbly into a life of prostitution’.  The novel isn’t short (416 pages in paperback, again according to Wikipedia).  Part of me wonders if De Sica would have done better to make a longer film – to have given himself more scope to create a texture that’s missing from what he’s put on screen.  But the picture he ended up with is so increasingly unsatisfactory that I was relieved when, after a hundred minutes, Two Women was over.

15 August 2015