Cinema: Mamma Mia! That's-a Spicy Meatball!

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SUNFLOWER

A Fiasco in Three Acts

Act I

"He is alive! I tell you, he is alive!" screams Giovanna (Sophia Loren). She is a woman with the exuberant breasts and thighs of a Gaston Lachaise statue, the eyes of a Modigliani portrait; perhaps that is why no one listens to her voice. Years ago, she and a soldier, Antonio (Marcello Mastroianni), were married. He was sent to the Russian front; she returned to her village. The war ended; Antonio was left behind on a frozen Russian landscape. Now there are gray spiderwebs in the luxuriant brown hair. In a dozen years Antonio has never written. Yet in Giovanna's heart is inscribed the legend: Antonio lives! She packs a photo of Antonio and takes a train to Russia.

Act II

Weeks of wandering in the Soviet Union bring Giovanna to the brink of exhaustion. There she finds a little wooden house. Inside are wide-eyed, redheaded Mascia (Ludmila Savelyeva) and her little daughter. Yes, si, da (one has his choice in this dubbed babel), Mascia is Antonio's Russian wife. An evening train pulls into the little town —and see! It is the bigamist. Giovanna glares at him. Mastroianni, touching bottom in a long and honorable career, gives his impression of a spaniel. Weeping, Giovanna boards the shuttle and heads back to Italy.

Act III

Mascia analyzes lugubrious Antonio. "Not even our nice new apartment has made you smile," she mourns. True, all too true. The spaniel packs a lunch and entrains for Italy. But the old union is doomed. Giovanna has a lover, a bambino (Carlo Ponti Jr.) and a job sandpapering the rumps of clothing dummies. Henry Mancini's calorific music sounds the knell for Antonio. He gets its message and entrains to Russia, to Mascia and the glorious new housing project where the balalaikas play.

Sunflower cannot totally extinguish De Sica's guttering genius. A scene of returning Italian soldiers, for instance, is a fine reminder of the noon of neo-realismo. Wives, mammas and children of the missing gather at the railroad station, holding aloft glossy little snapshots, a forest of question marks. Does anyone know the fate or whereabouts of these vanished? The soldiers move on; the incomplete tragedies remain. A bigger puzzle also lingers: Why should so many proven talents squander themselves on Sunflower? For pane? Certainly—but also to counter the sexual revolution with the kind of romantic movie they don't make any more. Chetnal fortuna—the pornography of sex cannot be replaced by the opera of soap.

· S.K.