Sunflower is Sophia Loren at her most quietly heartbreaking, as a wife who searches for a husband lost to war and finds a life that has moved on without her.
Sunflower (1970), directed by Vittorio De Sica, stars Loren as Giovanna, an Italian woman whose husband Antonio, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is sent to the Russian front during the Second World War and does not return. Years later, Giovanna travels to the Soviet Union to search for him, and discovers that he has survived, but has built a new family there.
The film’s famous sunflower fields, where soldiers are buried, give the search its visual weight, but Loren’s performance gives it its human weight. Giovanna is not angry in a simple way; she is grieving, hopeful and dignified, and Loren lets those feelings exist together. The final scenes, in which Giovanna must accept a painful truth, are played with a restraint that makes them more moving, not less.
Sunflower is a signature role because it returns Loren to the wartime Italy of Two Women, now from the perspective of waiting rather than fleeing. It is a mature, unsentimental performance, and one of the clearest examples of her work with De Sica in later years.