Bellucci's role makes Malena less of a real, flesh-and-blood woman than some jiggly caricature of the female ideal as viewed from Renato's testosterone-soaked gaze. Despite its breathtaking camerawork (courtesy of Lajos Koltai), Ennio Morricone's sultry score, and Bellucci and Sulfaro's wonderful performances, Malena seems to get lost somewhere on the way to manhood.
All of this is seen through the eyes of Renato, who enters the film a boy and, predictably, exits a man. When Sicily is finally liberated, they virtually drive the poor woman out of town on a rail in one of the film's most potent, horrific scenes. The local women, never members of the Widow Scordia's fan base, are quick to snipe and gossip. Courted by the oiliest townie around, Malena finds her life spiraling toward the gutter until she is reduced to sleeping with German officers to pay the bills.
Malena movie series#
Up to this point, Tornatore has been content to pass the time showing us Renato's idle daydreams (and their moister nocturnal counterparts) as he imagines himself and his love in a series of Hollywood tableaux: “Me Tarzan, you Malena.” The sudden loss of her husband, however, means the sudden loss of her income as well, and, eventually, destitution. News soon arrives, however, that Malena's soldier has been killed, which precipitates a creeping tonal shift in the film. Unlike the other kids, who seem only to want to bed Malena and be done with her, Renato falls head over heels in the worst sort of puppy love, vowing to himself that he will be her guardian angel until her husband can return from the front. When Malena makes her way through the town's picturesque streets, all eyes turn as she passes by, but none more so than those of the scrawny Renato. Like the rest of the boys in the seaside Castelcuta, he's smitten with the lovely Malena Scordia (Bellucci), a young seamstress whose husband is away at war. Renato Amoroso (Sulfaro) is 13 and overripe with teenage hormones. Unlike Tornatore's earlier film, however, this isn't all hearts and flowers and flickering silver-screen shadow plays Malena, whimsical at first, steadily darkens, its youthful storyline twisted by the dark smear of war and its attendant rationings, both physical and emotional. Like Cinema Paradiso, this new film revolves around a young, film-infatuated boy living in a small village - Castelcuta, Sicily, to be precise - in 1940, the era of Il Duce's fascist ravings, patriotic fervor, and slowly unfurling disaster. Best known stateside for 1989's Cinema Paradiso, Tornatore - 44 years young - reaches out to the past in his work or, more to the point, grabs us and takes us back with him, rubbing our noses in tiny Italian histories. , alas, that it cannot.A nostalgia for things past, a kind of dusty sentiment, envelops the films of Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore. It doesn’t help that the action of the film gets darker and darker, leading to a public humiliation that seems totally out of scale with what has happened before and an ending that aims to move us much more deeply. “Malena” is a simpler story, in which a young man grows up fascinated by a woman and essentially gets married to the idea of her. Please.) But Fellini sees the humor underlying the sexual obsession except (usually but not always) in the eyes of the participants. She continues to shine in Renato’s eyes, however, even after her field of knowledge widens when her father takes her to a brothel for the old “I give you the boy, give me back the man” routine.įellini’s films often feature adolescents inflamed by women who embody their carnal desires.
This descent into the world requires her to spend a lot of time half-dressed in front of Tornatore’s appreciative camera. She has to give up her teaching job because of the unwarranted scandal and is ultimately reduced by wartime poverty to date German soldiers. The story tells of Malena’s bad luck after her husband was called in by the military and his reputation was marred by local gossip. They use Malena as a subject for their auto-erotic hobbies, but to Renato she looks more like a dream, a heroine, a woman he wants to protect from herself – with her bare hands, hopefully.
The story is told by Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro), who at the start of the film is admitted to the local Brotherhood of Watching Girls.