Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A young widow flees from Rome during WWII and takes her lonely twelve-year-old-daughter to her rural hometown but the horrors of war soon catch up with them.
Two Women is best remembered for Sophia Loren's towering, Oscar-winning performance — raw, visceral, and utterly convincing — which elevates the film well above its conventional war-drama framework. The plot itself is a fairly episodic wartime journey narrative, competent but not especially original in structure. De Sica's direction is assured and the Italian neorealist-influenced cinematography is solid without being visually remarkable. The film's treatment of rape and its aftermath was bold for its era, giving it some distinctive edge, but the overall conception remains within familiar war-film territory. The ending is somber and unresolved in a way that feels honest rather than dramatically crafted.