Herald rating: * * *
Cast: Monica Bellucci, Giuseppe Sulfaro, Luciano Federico, Matilde Piana.
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore.
Rating: M (violence, sexual references).
Running time: 94 mins.
Screening: Rialto, Bridgeway cinemas.
Review: Peter Calder
A sunlit and hormone-drenched coming-of-age story set in wartime Sicily, the new film from Giuseppe Tornatore marks a return to the
crowd-pleasing sentimentality of his Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso.
As in that film, the point of view is through the doe-eyed gaze of a boy, 12-year-old Renato Amoroso (Sulfaro), whose life is transformed on the day Mussolini declares war when he gets a new bicycle and claps eyes on the lustrous Malena Scordia (Bellucci is the collagen-lipped beauty whom Tornatore directed in a Dolce and Gabbana cosmetics commercial).
Malena, whose husband is in Africa fighting for Il Duce, undulates around town on strappy high heels, her eyes demurely downcast, while Renato and his mates (not to mention Tornatore's attentive camera) ogle the fabric sliding across her curves.
Inevitably she becomes the focus of vicious town gossip (prompted by the women's jealousy and the men's lust) and the film watchfully depicts the process by which community opinion can turn prejudice into reality.
Malena's remorseless downward spiral - and unexpected late change of fortune - are inextricably entangled with Renato's emergent adolescent sense of himself; the film is littered with movie-parody fantasy sequences in which he imagines himself winning her love by rescuing her.
It's a potentially pungent idea but the film never lets any sense of drama get in the way of its nostalgic whimsy. Worse, Tornatore's microscopic attention to the topography of Bellucci's body (we see her most of the time in close-up as a series of disembodied details - neck, breast, leg) matches rather than reflects Renato's fevered gawping. Thus robbed of any personality (she has barely 100 lines) she never engages our sympathy or even interest.
Lajos Koltai's fabulous cinematography makes the fictional town of Castelcuto - it was filmed in Siracusa - shimmer seductively, but Ennio Morricone's overblown score saturates a film which is, in the end, too lush to be truly successful.
