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MALENA Send This Review to a Friend
At first "Malena" merely seems like a a wartme Italian coming of age comedy, in which teenage boys during World War II ogle a stunning beauty who strolls through a Sicilian seaside village minding her own business but giving the youths enough fantasies with which to masturbate their way to hell. But by the time the film is over, the stakes are much higher. "Malena" reveals the dignity of a woman who, after thinking her soldier husband is dead, being hated by villagers for her sexuality and for ultimately consorting with Nazis, returns with more moral rectitude than the pro-fascist town-folk who collaborated in more serious ways.
Writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore, who had an international, Oscar-winning hit with "Cinema Paradiso," has based his new film on a story by Luciano Vincenzoni. The narrative unfolds as a memoir from the perspective of Renato Amoroso, one of the boys so infatuated with Malena Scordia. Although Renato, played by Giuseppe Sulfaro, never gets to know her, in his mind he assumes the role of her protector as he spies on her and sees her sadness at the presumed loss of her husband in the war and her resistance to the men in the town hitting on her as the price she must pay for trying to survive in a hostile environment. The women in the town are fiercely jealous of her and spread rumors that she is sleeping with just about everybody. Renato's feelings for Malena are touching.
Monica Bellucci is as dazzling as she should be in the title role. She walks tantalizingly with perfect posture and moves at a deliberate gait, looking neither to right or left as she seemingly ignores the world about her. In the privacy of her home, as Renato finds through his spying, she dances clutching a photograph of her husband. It is sad to see her as the whore to the Germans, and then to watch her being shorn and beaten in reprisal by the local women who find their justification for what they wanted to do to her all along. The scene makes one wonder how many others after the war were treated this way not out of justice but out of personal vengeance.
"Malena" gathers momentum as it progresses, and in the end emerges as a tender, moving story. A Miramax Films release.
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