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Sophia Loren blossoms in son's 1st feature film
During an interview on the set of "Between Strangers," Loren sat quietly in her trailer, an obvious tenderness in her hazel, almond-shape eyes as she recalled her son's boyish hesitation. "I said `My God, you look like you're asking a woman to get married,'" Loren said, recalling discussions about her role in the film. She spoke to Reuters between takes of a scene shot last week on the shores of Lake Ontario. The two, mother and son, look close, but they admit to fear of arguments and tension during the seven-week shooting of the film, where Loren plays an unhappy housewife with a mysterious secret. "I have a very aggressive nature, tragic, and I thought `My God! What's going to happen to me when my son says `Action'? Will I be good?'" "But it's happened in a very simple way, in the most wonderful, serene atmosphere because he knew what he wanted and I knew, through my own experiences, what I had to do," the Oscar-winning actress said. On the set Loren appears in her element, playing a scene where she admires stone statues in a museum, while her son Edoardo Ponti runs back and forth between her and the camera. During the two years while he wrote the script, Edoardo Ponti, who studied in a California film school, shared his ideas with his mother. So he said casting her in the film became an obvious, natural thing to do. LEARNING FROM MOM AND DAD The 28-year old director could have bragged about attracting a cast including Gerard Depardieu, Malcolm McDowell and Klaus Maria Brandauer with a budget under US$10 million. But he simply acknowledged how lucky he was to grow up with parents Loren and his father, producer Carlo Ponti. "I learned everything from both my parents," Edoardo Ponti said. "It was not really about me wanting to direct, but just me paying attention to people, to their faces, their hands, atmospheres, a way a room was lit." Loren said she refused in recent years to play in several films because she didn't like the characters she was offered. But the role of Olivia, written for her by her son, was very much in line with her true nature. "Olivia is a woman who is very discrete, lonely and closed within herself," she said about her character. "It's a very good role for a woman of my age and of my nature." The 67-year old actress, voted the world's most beautiful woman two years ago, won an Academy Award in 1962 for "Two Women" -- a film produced by her husband -- and last appeared in 1995 with Jack Lemmon and the Walter Matthau in the comedy "Grumpier Old Men". But when preparing to direct her in "Between Strangers," Ponti was mostly inspired by her 1977 interpretation of a housewife in Ettore Scola's "A Special Day," a psychological drama depicting Mussolini's Italy. He asked French actor Gerard Depardieu, known for his epic performance in "Cyrano de Bergerac," to play Olivia's "confidant," an eccentric gardener who helps her through her unhappy marriage. Award-winning US actress Mira Sorvino plays an American photo-journalist who cannot remember taking the picture that brought her kudos from Time Magazine, while Deborah Kara Unger is a Canadian cellist of German descent who is obsessed with her father, an ex-convict. The three women live in the same neighborhood in Toronto, a city that charmed Ponti because of its diversity. Canada's most populous city, he said, is a "mosaic" where people cohabit in better harmony than in the American "melting pot". The film, he said, is about finding your place in the world. "These three women are definitely on the road to some kind of a blossoming, however painful it is," Ponti said with passion during a break on the set. "EVERYTHING SHE DOES IS PERFECT" He said women were always a source of inspiration for his work, first in "Liv," a short film shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1998, and in "Requiem for a Friend," a musical tribute to his mentor, Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski. "When I think of a story, I think of a woman. I like their courage, their ability to take so much more emotional pain and so much more weight than men do." He said Olivia's soul was very close to his mother's, whom he described as "very vulnerable, very fragile, very introverted and yet capable of great strength when necessary." Ponti and Loren said separately that no tensions arose between them on the set. Asked what he discovered about his mother, Ponti said without hesitation: "She is really perfect. Everything she does is perfect, perfect. "For me as a director, it's such a gift of meeting a person who you end up trusting so much that whatever they do, you find it perfect. It's such a relief," he said, stressing his mother's sense of timing, her "wealth of emotional resonance" and her flexibility. And then, as her son, he can take the liberty to be very direct when giving her directions. "Dai dai! (Go, go!)," he shouted on the set while she sat on a high chair, noble and quiet, her gray curls protected from the heat of the July sun by an umbrella held by a middle-aged man. The Canadian-Italian co-production "Between Strangers" will be released in Europe and North America in September 2002.
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