An Italian woman is convinced her husband survived World War 2Starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.Written by Tonino Guerra, Cesare Zavattini and Giorgi Mdivani.Directed by Vittorio De Sica.This is my first foreign subtitled film of the year and it's pretty average.There are no stand out performances and the story just about kept my interest but didn't have me on the edge of my seat. Sophia Loren is one of those actresses that was spoken about a lot in the seventies and eighties but as far as know this is the first time I have seen her in anything.We don't really get the chance to know any of the two main characters and the whole thing is very slow and never really gets going. On a more positive note the soundtrack by Henry Mancini ( another famous name from the seventies and eighties) is superb and the cinematography, considering this was made in 1970 was really good. I loved the location filming.Overall a bit too slow for me.7/10 mainly for the soundtrack.

I suppose this film is just a maudlin melodrama, so is the music by Mancini. But then..., what a marvelous maudlin melodrama!... Why shouldn't it be? what's wrong with maudlin melodramas? If they are well done and authentic with their characters, if we get wrapped up with their emotions..., well, can you ask for anything more?I just saw this movie on "You Tube" for the second time. I remember seen it on late TV in Italy, many years ago, and the impression was so powerful that after somebody mentioned it a few days ago --I didn't remember any more this title until they mentioned it-- I decided to look for it and watch it again, to see after so many years if the impression was still the same (so many films are a total disappointment when seen for a second time years later), but it wasn't the case with this one.The story is so poignant that it can hold on its own very well no matter the change in mores and film technical improvements, it definitely grabs your interest till the very end (I must admit the film is far from perfect, since, for example, there are no indications of how many years went by or the new life style Sophia's character turns to after her Russian trip.It also has two climaxes, both marvelous, but I think they should have decided for one or the other, two climaxes is too much within the same movie, and the length should have been shortened quite a bit.Anyhow, forget about the lachrymose side of the story and submerge yourself in it (also get some Kleenex handy because everybody will need them, and plenty) and if you have to have a good cry, well, have it and enjoy it!! (After all is just a movie).

A credible melodrama, but a totally ridiculous story. However, we should understand it - the movie's pro-soviet propagandistic stance is explicit. Fact is that it's literally IMPOSSIBLE for any missing-in-action Italian (or German, if we come at that) soldier, to have been cutely integrated in the Russian society. The N.K.V.D. was everywhere, and any such foreigner would have been found in a matter of weeks (months, at most), and treated like a spy. The Georgian Butcher was reserving the same fate even to the Russian soldiers who fell prisoners to the enemy: his paranoia dictating that the only explanation for having survived was defection, they were considered by default traitors and sent to the Gulag. So, our poor Mastroianni here, far of happily living ever after with Savelieva, would have been deported to Vorkuta or Ekibastuz, as a spy, for 10 years (or, rather, 25 - these being the standard imprisoning terms). After being released (in case he survived the abuses of the extermination camps), he would have been forced to live in exile (forced domicile), still in some village of Siberia or the Central Asia deserts. No way in hell for him even to travel in some other Russian township, close by - while the idea of coming back to Italy for a visit is as ludicrous as sending him to Mars.But, well, Guerra wrote the script before Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" was published, so he can be excused for being so ignorant about the Russian realities.

"I Girasoli" is certainly one of the best romantic stories in an honest and pure setting in Italy and Russia. It is a dramatic love story of Antonio and Giovana wanting to stay together in the war. The impossibility to hold on to the newly found and sweetest happiness becomes inevitable in the destructive war, where Anoinio is found half frozen by a Russian woman. The accent lies in finding love in warm sunny Italy and loosing this in the freezing cold war thousands of miles away. Although in this new other world there is love too, it is never the same as before. At the end the search for the lost love is completed and in vain when life has changed there lives irreversibly. Un impossibile ritorno al passato.