Sunflowers (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | sunflowers |
| Original title | I girasoli |
| Country of production |
Italy Soviet Union France |
| original language |
Italian English Russian |
| Publishing year | 1970 |
| length | 107 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Vittorio De Sica |
| script |
Tonino Guerra Cesare Zavattini Georgi Mdiwani |
| production |
Arthur Cohn Carlo Ponti |
| music | Henry Mancini |
| camera | Giuseppe Rotunno |
| cut | Adriana Novelli |
| occupation | |
| |
Sunflowers is a 1970 film drama directed by Vittorio De Sica . It was made in an Italian-Soviet-French co-production.
action
During the Second World War , the seamstress Giovanna met the 32-year-old electrician Antonio. He comes from northern Italy and is in Naples to go to Africa as a soldier in two days. Both fall in love and get married, although Antonio has always refused marriage in his previous life. The marriage gives him twelve days of special leave and Giovanna hopes that after this time the war may already be over. Both spend their honeymoon in Antonio's house. The twelve vacation days are almost over and Antonio suddenly reacts aggressively to Giovanna's presence and chases her through the village. He is admitted to a psychiatric hospital as sick , where Giovanna visits him. It becomes clear that Antonio is healthy and that the briefing just wanted to avoid military service. The clinic director gives him the choice of either being tried before a court martial or volunteering at the Russian front. A little later, Giovanna and Antonio say goodbye at the train station. Antonio promises to return and bring her a fur coat.
A few years later the war is over, but Antonio does not return. The only thing you can tell Giovanna at the offices is that there is no evidence that Antonio perished. One day Giovanna meets a veteran at the train station who fought with Antonio on Don. He tells her how both marched through icy Russia until Antonio collapsed and asked him to go on without him. This was the last moment he saw him alive. Giovanna is outraged that nobody helped Antonio.
Shortly after Stalin's death, Giovanna decides to travel alone to the Soviet Union to look for Antonio. With a functionary at her side, she goes to the place where Antonio was left behind. The plains are overgrown with sunflowers to the horizon , with each sunflower representing one of the war dead. A little further away, graves of fallen people line entire regions. Giovanna walks it in vain. She visits villages and asks the residents about Antonio, but nobody recognizes him in her photo. After searching in vain in the football stadium and in front of factories, Giovanna finally meets villagers who show her the way to Mascia's house. The young woman tells her how she found Antonio half dead in the snow and took him home and looked after him. He had lost his memory at the beginning. Now they both live together and have a child. Both women go to the train station, where Antonio arrives from work. He is motionless when he sees Giovanna. She, in turn, rushed into the departing train without having spoken to him. She breaks down crying on the train.
Giovanna returns to Italy and destroys Antonio's paintings. She starts an affair with Ettore and the two eventually come together. You are moving to Milan . Antonio moves into an apartment with his family in a new development area, but has lost all zest for life. With the help of Mascia, he finally travels to Milan and calls Giovanna. At first she refuses to meet, but finally agrees to see them again in her apartment. Antonio tries to explain to her why he didn't come back after the war ended. The war changed him, in the end they both became victims of the war. Although he doesn't want to lose Giovanna again, she rejects him. Like him, she now has a child. She named it Antonio, not after him, but after the saint. Before he leaves, he gives her a fur coat, as he had promised before he went to the front. A little later she said goodbye to him from the station with tears in her eyes.
production
Sunflower was shot in Italy and the Soviet Union. Filming locations included Bereguardo , Milan and Moscow ; The scenes at the burial ground were made near Poltava and were completed in September 1969. The shooting in the Soviet Union was realized in cooperation with Mosfilm . Cameraman was there Dawid Winizki . Sunflowers is considered to be the first Western European film to be made as a Soviet co-production since the beginning of the Cold War .
Sunflower was released in Italian cinemas on March 14, 1970 and had its Moscow premiere in the presence of Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti in June 1970. The film also opened in German cinemas on September 24, 1970. On May 26, 1972, it was shown in the GDR cinemas and on November 26, 1977 it was shown on the first program on GDR television .
criticism
“Under De Sica's hesitant direction, based on an outdated script, the naive melodrama looks like a yellowed painting: touchingly anachronistic, produced by the time in every respect,” judged the film-dienst . For Cinema , Sonnenblumen gathered “[big] names in a sentimental portrait of the time”, while the Spiegel called the film a “sentimental, incredibly simple cinema melodrama ...”. Even the Protestant film observer does not think much of the film: "Made by people who claim artistic rank, made artless, sentimental, superficial and politically irrelevant."
The GDR's criticism found that de Sica and his screenwriters “[accentuate] the universally applicable in the extreme of their story. In expressively heightened, relentless realism, they reproduce the horrors of the war and the suffering it brought on people, and in the passages filmed in the Soviet Union [...] they give a lovingly and closely observed picture of life there and a self-evident one Humanity. " Sunflowers is a" film against war, about the vitality and high morality of ordinary people. "
Awards
Sophia Loren won a David di Donatello for Best Actress (Migliore Attrice) in 1970 . She was also nominated for a Fotogramas de Plata for Best Foreign Actress.
The film received an Oscar nomination for Best Score in 1971 .
Web links
- Sunflowers in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Sunflowers on kino-teatr.ru (Russian)
Individual evidence
- ^ Neue Zeit , September 13, 1969, p. 2.
- ^ Donald Dewey: Marcello Mastroianni: His Life and Art . Carol Publishing, New York 1993, p. 15.
- ^ Sophia Loren in Moscow . In: Neue Zeit , June 4, 1970, p. 4.
- ↑ Sunflowers. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Sunflowers on cinema.de
- ↑ fur given away . In: Der Spiegel , No. 43, 1970, p. 228.
- ↑ Evangelical Press Association, Munich, Review No. 423/1970.
- ^ Story of a broken love . In: Neue Zeit , June 13, 1972, p. 4.
- ↑ Current screen - sunflowers . In: Neues Deutschland , April 26, 1980, p. 4.