Surprisingly incoherent and boring

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Sophia Loren is a Naples beauty who marries Marcello Mastroianni on the spur of the moment just before he goes off to World War II and spends years after it ends trying to find him. She ends up in Russia where what she discovers breaks her heart, leads her into a new life, but it is not over yet.This personal story of war could have happened to thousands of women (at least) and is told tenderly with a beautiful musical score by Henry Mancini and with sincere performances. A few of the details are rather far-fetched or unresolved, such as when Marcello Mastroianni comes back to visit his aging mother and never does. Also, how Loren initially finds Loren is really a bit beyond belief. What makes the film special is that it reminds us that no matter what side of the war one might be on, there are always heartbreaks, even if it comes to someone inside the enemy camp.

"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.

The director Vittorio De Scica directed one of the best films depicting the tragedies and sorrows of those involved in wars against their will. Both Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni were superb in performing their respective roles as commoners living a peaceful life and who had their destiny changed all of a sudden into misery and agony. This film may be rated one of the best antiwar movies in the 20th century. I have seen this picture on my own DVD many times and each time I am deeply touched by the story. The most impressive scenes of the film are Sophia Loren's reunion with her husband who was now living a seemingly happy life with a Russian woman who had saved his life --- the reunion which was just the beginning of her tragedy. The outstanding script and the direction of De Scica as well as the superb acting of both Sophia and Marcello render "I Girasoli" a masterpiece in Italian realism in cinematography.

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).