Malena

As with Tornatore's 1989 Academy award winner, Cinema Paradiso, Malèna is strictly "coffee table" film-making - beautifully presented, idealized images with the ravishing Monica Bellucci being the centrepiece of a story about the awakening sexual desires of a group of adolescent males, a kind of Felliniesque, rose-coloured image of the director's personal past, at least slightly more bearable, thanks to the superb production vales than fellow-countryman Bernardo Bertolucci's ogling of Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty (1996).

Set in a provincial Sicilian town at the time of WWII, this coming-of-age story is seen entirely from the viewpoint of the now-adult Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro) who recounts his adolescent crush on Malèna (Bellucci), the town beauty, who when her husband it killed in action becomes not only the subject of the randy male populace but attracts the vituperation of the far less alluring wives and ends up having to become what they accuse her of in order to make ends meet (so to speak).

Although the film does achieve a certain poignancy in its latter stages when Tornatore graduates from copying Fellini and displaying the virtually dialogue-less Belluci’s charms, it is too radical a shift from one--point-perspective fantasy to reality to convince and in any case by then it is unlikely that anyone is going to be particularly interested.

 

Want something different?