Rape Scene in the Church
During the movie, along with Cesira's struggle to live properly, we witness the bildung of Rosetta, from a girl into a woman. There are scenes that she admires and imitates her mother's beauty.
It's the movie of discovery of sexuality, but within war times, a harsh and agonizing discovery. Before the catastrophic rape scene, Rosetta stares right into the hole at the roof of the bombed church, sees the birds which look like a sign of hope but later she happens to be raped. After the rape, this time Cesira, the mother, looks into the hole, now meaning just the opposite and then we, for the first time, see another hole at the ground of the church, which, I guess, symbolizes the loss of Rosetta's virginity, which also shows the destruction of another sanctity, the church itself. Two sanctities together, destructed. Is it raw psychoanalysis, I don't know.
On the other hand, as a late extension of Neo-realism, this film also is a sign of diverging from the main anguish of the war, now our attention is drawn into daily problems of life, apart from the the main period of neo-realism, of course thanks to the author Alberto Moravia, more than Zavattini or de Sica.
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