Movies Abroad: Much Woman

(9 of 9)

Art doesn't enter into it. Our cinema is more precarious, but our people have in dividualism. Hollywood is in danger of fossilization." There is no fossilization in Boccaccio '70, in which Sophia is again la dònna popolana, playing an illiterate Neapolitan girl who works in a traveling fair and delivers her body each Saturday night to the winner of a raffle. The fair itself is alive with superb detail, from the smallest of watermelon seeds to the largest of the paunchy Italian farmers with hot breath and sausage fingers. In this milieu, Sophia is not a star showing off but a figure that belongs.

In an outgrown red dress, her hair a disheveled beehive dripping fresh honey, she laughs, and smirks, and races the blood of the aged. A big bull gets loose and panics the fairgrounds, thundering and charging through the crowds. The animal stops and takes a long fierce look at Sophia. She slowly removes her blouse.

The bull stands glazed a moment, then runs off snorting in inexplicable terror. A man in the crowd speaks for all when he says: "God bless her."