"Two Women"

At least a couple of the plot synopses I’ve found online for Vittorio de Sica’s 1960 “Two Women” are just plain wrong. So I thought I’d give my own brief (clumsy) one here, and I may have a few points wrong as I’m writing wholly from memory but not so wrong as some of the synopses I’ve read.

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With her preteen daughter, Cesira (Sophia Loren) flees from Rome to the village of her birth, where she hopes they may find food and refuge during the waning days of WWII.

I missed the first few minutes, when they were still in Rome, except for learning that she was widowed, her husband much older, and that she falls in love with one of her husband’s friends, Giovanni, with whom she has a brief affair. His seduction of her is a clumsy one but knowing, even exploitative of her weaknesses. He tumbles her onto the floor of his shop and in protest of his advances she complains of being injured. But she succumbs. Her attraction to him is plainly evident, her marriage having been a loveless one which provided her security and status.

Though Rosetta (Eleanora Brown) is the product of a loveless marriage, Cesira is wholly devoted to her and proud of her.

And protective. In one instance after another, during their trip to Cesira’s birth home, Cesira’s difficult position as a lone woman amongst leering, victimizing men is shown. Her daughter, though a preteen, is also beginning to attract notice, and Cesira fends off advances, including those of two Fascists who, intimating an exchange of sexual favors for food, attempt to conscript them into kitchen work.

“We’re not servants!” Cesira protests, refusing them not only as a woman, bristling against sexual victimization, but also abjuring what would be to her a lower social status, preferring even the life of a peasant foraging sustenance from the land.

The trip home and the time the movie spends focusing on their life there, depicts the plight of the Italian “peasant” as one divorced from politics inasmuch as their concern is with living, with having enough food, with managing as comfortable a life as they are able. An exception is the educated Michele Di Lebero (Jean Paul Belmondo) who is against the fascists and gives himself as willing to die for his ideals.

On her first night in the village, they stand outside and watch as the Allies drop great lights in the sky which uncover the movements of troops. Cesira asks Michele if they can see them and is dismayed when he says that they can. Is there no place to hide? No, Michele says, not even from themselves. Cesira protests she has nothing to hide, then remembering Giovanni acknowledges there is one thing. Just one.

Michele falls in love with Cesira and a good part of the movie is spent following his hesitant courtship of her. His decency is illustrated in his accidentally happening upon Rosetta in her bath, and fleeing, apologetic, horrified at having inadvertantly violated her privacy.

His role in respect to Rosetta is one of a fatherly protector, a provider.

He brings her bread.

Cesira, seeing herself as experienced, and Michele as a young innocent (though she is not much older than him), even as she reaffirms for Rosetta that she is still a child, and not to worry over Michele having seen her bathing, tells Rose that if she was a little older she would consider him a good husband for her.

Cesira, after all, is in love with Giovanni, though she knows nothing can come of it. Or, at least, infatuated with the more aggressive Giovanni. And is he not, in a sense, her first love?

One realizes that despite her “experience” in her marriage, Cesira is just as much a novice at love as Michele, with whom she carries on a mild flirtation.

Their plight becoming more desperate, Cesira and Michele take a trip to another town to try to secure food. I think it’s around this time that Michele protests her traveling alone, and Cesira shows him a knife that she carries, that she’s a confident woman able to take care of herself. If a German Nazi came upon her, she wouldn’t hesitate to use the knife. She seems to believe that she can protect herself and her daughter in any situation.

On this particular trip, they come across a woman whose baby was killed by the Nazis and has gone mad. This frightens Cesira but she comes off as less empathetic than revolted by the woman’s vulnerability. As the Nazis roll around, she and Michele take refuge in the home of a more upper class friend of his, only to learn that a Nazi is there dining. The Nazi is by no means one with whom to be sympathetic, but an interesting conversation takes place in which the Nazi reveals his Italian education, and the man of the house says then the Nazi must realize the philosophical stance of the Italians on their occupation and essentially continuing to accept and live life as it comes. The Nazi says no, he doesn’t understand it all, and accuses them of being classist and disinterested in the poverty of the peasants while continuing to eat richly. “But they choose to live like that,” the man of the house protests, also insisting that they don’t have that much food after all, that the meal to which they’re treating him is a special one. Cesira, in the meanwhile, is back gathering provisions from a well-stocked pantry. When she hears the Nazi say that not just the Italians but the children of the Italians will have to live with their sins, she erupts in a rage–why the children?!–putting them all at risk, but an air raid sends them scattering…

And she into the arms of Michele. He had partly thrown himself upon her in protection of her during the raid. When it is over she raises her head. He does not and for a moment we wonder if he’s dead. But he’s not. He kisses her and at first, as with Giovanni, she protests, then relents.

She is confused, embarrassed.

Finally, the allies arrive and toss food to them from their jeeps. Things are by no means secure. There are still Nazi air strikes. And desperate Nazis are still on the run. The villagers come across several in a field who threaten them with a gun, wanting food. While Rosetta runs to get them food, having been sent by Cesira, the Nazis demand a guide who can take them safely through the area, but all the men insist they aren’t that knowledgeable. When the food is thrown before the Nazis, they become even more hostile, and Michele steps forward in an attempt to placate. Thus, he ends up being taken hostage by the Nazis, who will use him as a guide. Knowing the ruthlessness of the Nazis, the villagers fear for his safety. Cesira screams as he is taken away. But Michele assures them he will be all right and tells them to not interfere.

Cesira decides to take Rosetta and return to their house in Rome. Some of the villagers had thought to travel to the town where they had the best chance of finding Michele. Some decided it was too dangerous to travel at all yet. But Cesira, rather than staying, rather than going to the village where Michele might be found, is suddenly intent on returning to Rome. Rosetta, who is now 12, who has grown two inches, who Cesira has given a more grown-up hairdo celebrating her incipient transition from childhood into maturity, at first refuses to go and Cesira must force her.

Why? Why is Cesira so fearlessly determined to return to Rome? Is it to return to her house, or in her confusion over Michele is she fleeing to Giovanni, with whom she can have no real hope of any relationship.

Yet she is still protective of her daughter. In a lovely scene, they sit on a roadside wall to eat, Cesira tearing off bread and cheese to share with Rosetta, Sophia Loren beautifully communicating, as she has done throughout, her emotional, intellectual, biological passion for Rosetta, her child. We have no doubt at all she cherishes her and would give her life for her.

So why undertake this dangerous trip?

A group of Moroccan allies pass, making catcalls. Cesira wonders who they are. “Allies,” Rosetta says. She knows. Is starting to know things about the world her mother does not.

They take refuge in a bombed-out church to rest. A place of god. A religious individual might believe this a place of sanctuary, safety. But the church’s interior is rubble and its roof splintered. Cesira hears something, catches a glimpse of the Moroccans, their supposed military saviors, and realizes they are in desperate trouble. As the Moroccans descend upon them en masse, Cesira screams for Rosetta to run, but Rosetta is caught as well.

Cesira was perhaps foolhardy to attempt the trip to Rome, but not for reason of what happens to them in the church. There is no avoiding what happens in the church.

Cut to the next morning, Cesira waking, checking herself, then attempting to communicate with a shocked Rosetta. Eventually she gets the girl on her feet and moving. On the road, a U.S. jeep coming upon them, Cesira screams her rage at them and proclaims what is absolutely inexcusable for Rosetta. She yells that her daughter has been ruined, ruined for life.

Spoken by a woman who had spent many years in a loveless marriage, her despair over her own losses in love and life finding expression less in her own rape than in the rape of her daughter.

This seems the finishing stroke for Rosetta. She was in shock, yes, nearly catatonic, but it is when Cesira screams that Rosetta is ruined for life that she flees to a nearby river and washes herself, furious, humiliated.

They are given a ride in a truck. When the driver asks them if they had any connection with the Moroccans (Cesira and Rosetta look, after all, in a very bad way) Cesira now says no, they know nothing about them. The driver accepts this, revealing that the Moroccans had raped half a village that morning. He then turns his attention, singing, to Rosetta, flirting with her, inviting her to a dance. Cesira takes exception, pointing out her daughter is a child, not even 13, but he says his regular girl friends are all 15, defying her authority.

The weary Rosetta resists Cesira’s attempts to have her rest her head on her shoulder. Her mother had demanded she undertake this trip to Rome, which Rosetta had not wanted to be any part of, then had been unable to protect her. Her mother had proclaimed that she was ruined for life. And then her mother had denied that they had been attacked, as if ashamed. Rosetta now rests instead against the truck driver. And her mother leans against the window and, facing the countryside, silently cries.

That evening, Cesira wakes to find Rosetta gone. Where is she? It doesn’t even, at first, seem to occur to her that Rosetta has gone to the dance, which is our first assumption. Instead she thinks that Rosetta must have gone to try to find Michele. Michele who had treated them well. She begins begging a ride to the town where Michele might be found, only to learn that he was shot by the Nazis.

She then learns that her daughter willfully betrayed her trust and went to the dance with the trucker.

In the morning, when Rosetta returns, she is sullen. She acts as though she is a hardened, experienced woman, showing off treasured stockings that the trucker his evidently gifted her, presumably for sex. Cesira spanks her, as if she’s still a little child, screaming that she is never to wear those stockings. Then, in a pique of cruelty, she declares that Rosetta has been so selfishly pursuing her own enjoyment that she hasn’t thought to ask about Michele. And reveals that Michele is dead.

But Rosetta is no experienced, hardened woman. She’s a twelve year old child. She is in shock, and filled with resentment, yes, and confused. But she’s no experienced, hardened woman, just as her mother is not the experienced, hardened woman she’s taken herself for granted as being.

Rosetta collapses in tears, clinging to her mother. Cesira cries as well, for them both, and for having regained her daughter. No, not at having regained control over the child, but relief over not having lost her daughter to harsh bitterness and resentment, relief that she’s not lost her daughter to a renunciation of feeling, sympathy, empathy, love. Relief that her daughter hasn’t lost her emotional life.

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The rape at the end encapsulates and represents, really, Cesira’s entire life. Despite her victimization, she’s intensely prideful, but harbors also a good deal of shame beyond that felt over her affair with Giovanni, a shame that separates her from Michele and which she superimposes upon her daughter when she’s raped, and on Rosetta’s nylons.

But what about Italy? What about the harsh criticism of the scornful Nazi, who said Italy’s children would have to live with its sins.

And there was another scene, one in which the women of Cesira’s birth village were discussing how they felt about Mussolini. What about Mussolini’s face? How did they feel about the idea of going to bed with him? To which Cesira replied that it was simple, as long as one closed one’s eyes.

A deep, complex movie. I saw it once, many years ago. Saw it again recently and watched some of it with H.o.p., excluding the more violent scenes. He saw me watching it and said, “Oh, that looks interesting, I want to see it,” and so he watched this part and that part and I told him when he might not want to see something.

We then talked about it.

Well, we talked about the parts I felt he’d understand, which meant I did some major reframing of some of the issues.

Vittorio de Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” was easier to discuss. We watched it last year and I blogged some notes on it here.