Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Two Women
1960 · Vittorio De Sica · Two Women on Sightlines
A woman and a girl lie flat in a field while a plane comes over. Dust, noise, then nothing. They stand up, pick up their bundles, and keep walking.
For most of Two Women, that is what the war is: a thing you can do something about. You lie down. You get up. You carry what you own in a cloth bundle. You find bread, you get your daughter out of Rome, you walk south into the hills you were born in. Cesira is good at all of it.
Deleuze has a plain name for this arrangement. He calls it the action-image, and its big version — a whole encompassing situation, here a war, pressing on a person until her acts change her place inside it — is the large form. It is the ordinary contract of cinema, and Gábor Pogány's photography is built to honor it. The dossier describes his grammar as the human figure in a punishing landscape: sun-bleached stony country, then two women on a dusty road, then open ground during a strafing run. That alternation between the vast milieu and the thin taut line drawn across it is what Deleuze calls respiration-space. The film breathes in with the hills and out with the walk.
One thing never fits inside that breathing. Trovajoli's score is held back so that aircraft and explosions can work as what the dossier calls the intrusive force driving the narrative, and those sounds arrive from somewhere the frame can't point to. Deleuze separates the out-of-field that is merely next door from the out-of-field that has no location at all — a presence bigger than the film's world, pressing on it from outside. The war in Two Women is the second kind. You never see it whole. You hear it decide things.
Then mother and daughter stop to rest in an abandoned church on the road home, and colonial troops find them there. Nothing Cesira knows how to do applies to what happens. This is the exact hinge Deleuze built his two books around: the crisis of the action-image, the point at which a character still perceives perfectly well and can no longer answer what she perceives. He found that break in Italian neorealism, and in De Sica above all. But Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. begin broken; the stolen bicycle is a situation no action repairs, and we know it in the first reel. Two Women comes fifteen years after the war, in 1960, and does something those films could not. It hands you an hour of intact, competent, satisfying action, and then breaks it while you watch. The collapse becomes an event instead of a premise.
And it uses the most powerful instrument available for the job. The casting history is the film's real invention. Cukor was to direct, Magnani was to be the mother, and Loren was to be the daughter. Magnani declined, the configuration fell apart, and De Sica aged a mid-twenties Loren up into Cesira. What that produced is a machine: an audience's faith in a star's resourcefulness is itself a sensory-motor circuit, since the whole promise of a star vehicle is that she will find a way. De Sica spends the film's first half charging that promise and its second half stripping it. The dossier's phrase is exact — she is stripped of the protective competence on which her identity rests. He didn't invent a lens or a cut here. He found that the star system could be made to carry the neorealist wound, and that the bigger the star, the harder the break lands. He kept the film in black and white while the Italian industry moved to color and widescreen, so the instrument stayed austere.
The church itself is what Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever: a space that has stopped serving as a setting for action, emptied of use and coordinates until only its charge is left. The staging has been rehearsing this. Rooms and cellars in Rome, crowded rural interiors, each turning from shelter to trap. A ruined sanctuary is the end of that series, a building whose entire purpose was refuge.
Afterward the film changes species. Adriana Novelli's cutting holds on aftermath and consequence rather than dwelling on spectacle, which is a moral decision and also a formal one. Deleuze calls these pure optical and sound situations — opsigns — moments where a character, and we beside her, can only look and listen because nothing can be done. The person who does that is his voyant, the seer. Cesira spends the last movement of the film looking at her daughter, and she has never once been a woman who looks. She is a woman who does.
Watch the faces in that stretch. Deleuze splits the close-up in two: a reflecting face, held still, carrying one quality that has nowhere to go, and an intensive face, where small movements build toward a threshold. De Sica keeps mother and daughter in the same frame wherever he can, so the film often holds both at once. Eleonora Brown's Rosetta becomes a surface, withdrawn into damaged silence. Loren plays grief climbing into rage, without vanity. The distance between those two kinds of close-up is the film's actual subject.
That closeness to bodies is inherited, and the lineage is specific. From Umberto D. comes Zavattini's pedinamento, the method of shadowing an ordinary powerless figure with moral attention and no consoling ending; that discipline is why Loren never floats free of the film, and why the drama runs on food, shoes, bundles, and the physical labor of flight rather than on plot. From The Children Are Watching Us comes the device the film turns to atrocity: adult collapse registered in a child's uncomprehending gaze. Shoeshine supplies the engine of innocence corrupted by wartime circumstance, rerouted here onto a mother and daughter. Bicycle Thieves supplies the shape — an episodic walk through ruin, cut for continuity, hope leaking out at the pace of footsteps. Rome, Open City supplies Magnani's deglamorized wartime mother, the very performance her refusal handed to Loren. And Paisan supplies the home-front grammar of foreign armies moving through civilian life. In Paisan the armies pass through. Here one of them stops.
Bazin defended neorealism as an ethics of looking, arguing that refusing to carve reality into effects respects its ambiguity, and the dossier's claim follows him precisely: by declining to aestheticize suffering, the photography lends the atrocity documentary force. Deleuze took Bazin's material and moved the argument. What neorealism produced, he said, wasn't more reality; it was a new kind of image, one that asks to be read instead of acted upon. Two Women is that claim staged as a story.
Its significance is partly political and hard to say out loud in 1960. The marocchinate were committed by Moroccan Goumiers serving with the French Expeditionary Corps — troops on the liberating side. The films of 1945 could still photograph a people that resistance had brought into being. This one finds two women alone on a road and locates the injury inside the liberation. Belmondo is standing right there in it, around the moment of Breathless, playing Michele, the gentle idealist whose death closes off a different future. The rest is permission: Loren's award, the first competitive Best Actress for a performance in another language, proved that this register could carry an international market, which is a descent line made of licence rather than technique.
So watch the first hour for everything Cesira can do, and count it. Then watch her stop. The film ends with a mother reaching toward a daughter who has gone somewhere she can't be followed, and it resolves emotionally while refusing to console. Here's the question worth carrying out of it: is that reaching one more action, the circuit repairing itself? Or is it the first thing she's ever done that isn't one?
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — The first movement's register of "survival melodrama — a mother's resourcefulness in getting herself and her child out of danger": the Allied bombardment of Rome is the encompassing situation, and flight south to the Ciociaria is the act that answers it.
- respiration-space — Pogány's grammar of "the human figure in a punishing landscape" — sun-bleached stony Ciociaria exteriors alternating with the taut line of two women walking dusty roads and exposed on open ground during strafing and shelling.
- out-of-field-absolute — Trovajoli's score is held back at key junctures so ambient war sound — aircraft, explosions — can function as "the intrusive force that drives the narrative"; the war is never framed whole, arriving from a place the image cannot locate.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Cesira is "stripped by the final act of the protective competence on which her identity rests"; the assault in the church converts a story about escaping the war into one about the impossibility of escape, and no act of hers addresses it.
- espace quelconque — The abandoned church where mother and daughter stop to rest on the road home — the end of the film's staging pattern of spaces that "turn from shelter to trap" (the Rome cellar, the crowded rural interiors): a sanctuary emptied of its function.
- pure optical & sound situations — Novelli's editing derives the sequence's power from "the willingness to hold on aftermath and consequence rather than to dwell on spectacle"; the final movement is given over to grief with no available action.
- voyant — Cesira in the last movement — the emotional climax is "not the assault itself but Cesira's confrontation with what it has done to her daughter," an ending that "resolves emotionally without offering consolation." She watches and endures where she previously acted.
- reflexive-vs-intensive-face — The mise-en-scène keeps the dyad "within the same frame wherever possible": Eleonora Brown's Rosetta traces an arc into "withdrawn, damaged silence" (immobile, reflecting) against Loren playing "the mother's grief and rage without vanity" (feature, intensity).
- attitudes & postures — The drama is staged through "concrete, humble detail: food, shoes, bundles of belongings, the physical labor of flight," with Loren "earthy, voluble, physically committed" — the pedinamento discipline inherited from Umberto D. carried into a star vehicle.