Two Women (1960)

Vittorio De Sica's Two Women arrives from 1960, a full six decades before the cultural apparatus that now governs our cinema found its footing, and it conducts itself accordingly. Sophia Loren plays Cesira, a Roman shopkeeper who flees the bombing of the city with her twelve-year-old daughter Rosetta, and the film follows them into the mountains of Ciociaria, where the war eventually finds them in the worst way available. The cast is uniformly European and uniformly pale. No character pauses to interrogate the politics of their own depiction. The camera simply watches a mother try to keep a child alive, and mostly fails.

There is a mother and a daughter at the center, and the film's most harrowing passage concerns the violation of both, so a certain maternal gravity is present. We would be overstating matters to call it a program. This is humanist tragedy of the old school, the kind that locates its sorrow in the specific and refuses to convert it into a thesis. A young communist intellectual drifts through the story, and the film regards him with affection but no economic argument. The Moroccan soldiers who commit the central atrocity are treated as a historical fact of the 1944 campaign, not as a prompt for contemporary reflection. Nobody lectures. The war does the talking.

What remains is a solemn anti-war picture that earns its sorrow through performance and pacing instead of sermon. Loren won an Academy Award for it, the first for a foreign-language performance in the Best Actress category, and the honor is not difficult to understand. The film is serious, sad, and almost entirely innocent of the vocabulary we now bring to such things. It asks us to feel something. It does not ask us to agree with anything. In this respect it is a relic, and a quietly devastating one.