The sunflower carries a great weight of symbolism in this film. It doesn't appear until you have got half way through and follow Sofia Loren on her odyssey for a lost Italian husband in Russia, but when then the field of sunflowers open up, the greatness of the film and the story also open up. Vittorio de Sica and Cesare Zavattini worked together on many films, and they are all masterpieces, but it is difficult to conceive that any of them could have been greater than this. It's not just the story, as profound and touching as Doctor Zhivago, but also, in so many of de Sica's film, the very significant psychology. By all rational conclusions her husband should have been dead in Russia, lost in the winter, where even an Italian fellow soldier almost saw him dying and had to leave him there freezing to death in the snows actually prompted to do so by the dying man himself, and that fellow soldier tells the story to Sofia Loren, convinced that he was dead, since there was no other possibility, but still she feels he is still alive and goes all the way to Russia to search for him. She goes by instinct alone, overriding all common sense and rational probablility.
To this comes the extremely appropriate music by Henry Mancini, one of his finest examples of film music, changing style and melodies on the way according to the circumstances, and the probably most impressive instant is the funeral march in the snows. There is another funeral march as well, the very common one by Chopin, but in dead slow tempo, which adds to the very strong sensitivity and mood of the entire film, in which you feel the pathos of both Tolstoy and Doctor Zhivago, and James Hilton in his "Knight Without Armour", another gripping war and Russian winter novel. In brief, once more Vittorio de Sica has surpassed himself in greater eloquence than ever with Cesare Zavattini - and the eternal couple Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, who made many great films together, the best ones with Vittorio de Sica, although most of their films were comedies. This is no comedy and no tragedy either but rather a very profound presentation of humanity and destiny.
