Sunflower (1970)
At the end of World War II, Giovanna, a war bride living near Milan refuses to accept that her husband, Antonio, missing on the Russian front, is dead. There's a flashback to their brief courtship near her hometown of Naples, his 12-day leave to marry her, ruses to keep from deployment, and the ultimate farewell. Some years after the war, still with no word from Antonio, Giovanna goes to Russia to find him, starting in the town near the winter battle when he disappeared. Armed with his photograph, what will she find?
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Best movie of this year hands down!
How sad is this?
everything you have heard about this movie is true.
I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.
The movie, of course, deserves all superlatives it has received. I only want to add something to the dispute on whether it is realistic. Some talk about extermination(?) camps that POW's were sent to and that most were shot on the spot(wha?). This is ridiculous, only 10% died due to the harsh conditions in the LABOUR camps (remember it was wartime and nobody was living really comfortably?). Yes, it's still a large number, but most of them returned home. Now, about integrating in the soviet society, I don't know how realistic was that, but presumably a POW who had a child with a local and adopted the communist ideology (yes, it's possible that some folks may sympathize with the plight of the oppressed) might be set free without suspicion that he would be a spy.
As another reviewer pointed out this bit of cold war propaganda (pro Soviet) was absurdly impossible. An axis soldier would have been shot period or arrested as a spy and killed slowly in a prison camp.So you have to dismiss the story as absurd as it stands and place it in Iran or Finland or some place where it could have happened. Or just suspend your disbelief.Once you do that you can enjoy this bit of really well done maudlin romance. Loren had to be at the height of her classy beauty in this film (before she was aged for the story).I loved the part where she spots an Italian man---the only handsome well dressed stylish man in any of the Russian scenes. Of course Loren herself is like a super nova star compared to the kerchiefed thick legged Russian women. Italian audiences must have loved this film.I give it a 7 as it is very enjoyable once you deal with the absurd story and the maudlin nature of the movie. As another reviewer states what is so wrong with first class maudlin??
"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.
De Sica's grand neo-realist touch is hardly evident in this meandering tearjerker, whose performances far surpass the material. This USSR/Italian co-production is lovely to look at, though, and Mancini hit all the right notes while composing the love theme (which, by the way, was a concert standard of his).