After reaping critical praise during its tours through Europe and the United States, Signore and Signore: Leading Ladies of the Italian Cinema runs in Toronto until Aug.21, presenting a deluxe selection of both familiar and rare classics dedicated to the great actresses of Italian post-war cinema.
The retrospective – presented by the Cinematheque Ontario, in collaboration with Cinecittà Holding and the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto - covering a remarkable range of styles, this homage opened July 10 with Sophia Loren in her towering performance as Cesira, a widowed shopkeeper who flees the Allied bombing of Rome during World War II in Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1960).
The series also features Claudia Cardinale as a sultry nightclub singer seduced and abandoned by a wealthy playboy in Valerio Zurlini’s The Girl with a Suitcase (1960), and as the title character in Luchino Visconti’s exquisitely baroque and incestuous Sandra (1965).
Giulietta Masina shines in three roles: as Cabiria, an ingenuous Roman prostitute who is tricked and ridiculed by an assortment of hookers, priests and film stars in Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957); as the waif Gelsomina, sold by her mother for a plate of pasta to a strong-man circus performer in another Fellini masterpiece, La Strada (1954); and as a lonely and impressionable housewife, presiding over a villa outside Rome in Fellini’s visually extravagant Juliet of the Spirits (programmed July 12).
Other leading ladies include Anna Magnani as Pina, the good-hearted pregnant widow whose fiancé gives refuge to a resistance leader that is fleeing the Gestapo in Roberto Rossellini’s seminal Rome Open City (programmed July 14); Monica Vitti, offering a splendid parody of her Antonioni heroines, as a flower seller who ends up at the centre of a working-class triangle in Ettore Scola’s A Drama of Jealousy (1970); and Stefania Sandrelli as Adriana, a naive beauty who aspires to move from her village to Rome and become a star in Antonio Pietrangeli’s I Knew Her Well (1965), a bitterly ironic portrayal of a woman adrift in modernity.

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