Malèna (2000)
Directed by: Giuseppe Tornatore
Writers: Giuseppe Tornatore and Luciano Vincenzoni (story)
Summary: [warning, full of spoilers; highlight to view all the details] As seen through the eyes of Renato, an adolescent boy, we watch a beautiful woman named Malèna experience the hardships of World War II in a Sicilian town. Malèna’s husband is away fighting and Malèna has several disadvantages: she’s a woman lacking the protection of a husband, she’s also an outsider, and more significantly she’s beautiful. This causes a lot of gossip: she’s beautiful, and she’s not with her husband, so she must be a slut. The truth is Malèna is innocent, but Renato seems to be the only one who notices. He silently wages a guerrilla war against those who gossip about her. Things get worse for Malèna when first her husband and then her father are killed. Left with no job and no means of support, Malèna does finally turn to the only resource she has left—her body. When the war ends the women of the town drag her into the street and beat the hell out of her for servicing German soldiers. Her hair is cut off and she is run out of town. Then suddenly her husband Nino returns—turns out he was imprisoned, not killed—and he comes home to find his wife missing and strangers living in his house. No one will tell him what happens until Renato, the only one who knows the truth anyway, writes him a letter explaining the whole story. The film has a happy ending, after a fashion, as Nino finds Malèna and brings her back to town. The women who were so awful to her before suddenly find themselves making it up to her by greeting her like a respectable woman and offering her bargains in the market.
Things I liked: My interest in the film actually started with the soundtrack—I love Ennio Morricone and the score for this film is absolutely perfect. It doesn’t make me cry on its own like the score for The Mission, but it’s close. The acting, particularly from Monica Bellucci (Malèna) and Giuseppe Sulfaro (Renato) is fantastic, but it almost didn’t have to be. The direction, editing and cinematography are so well done, that they almost tell the story on their own. The film does a great job of both capturing a particular moment in time, and addressing universal problems. In particular the way that women are so much crueler to each other than men ever are to us; this comes across in the film so vividly in nearly made me ill. Also true and disturbing is the tendency to stand by and watch as injustice happens. There are clearly people, not just Renato, who are bothered by the savage beating Malèna receives, but no one makes an attempt to stop it. That scene is particularly well done in its absolute ugly brutality. It’s uncomfortable to watch, but it should be. Well done on the filmmaker’s part to actually let Malena look awful at the end of it rather than just ripping her clothes a little and giving her a pretty little bruise on her cheekbone. I’m not normally one for coming of age movies, but this one captures the idea so well, and makes it so clear why Malèna, a woman he never touched, is the one woman Renato will never forget. And sprinkled in are enough comic moments that are so typical of adolescence. I particularly liked Renato’s struggle to convince his father to allow him to wear long pants, mostly because I remember my grandfather describing the same struggle with his mother. One of my favorite sequences is Malèna dancing with her husband’s picture towards the beginning. It’s simultaneously sweet and heartbreaking.
Things I didn’t like: I’m really having to work to come up with this. I wanted the women and the men of the town to get more of a smack down than they got. I realize that the marketplace scene is a big deal—there’s a fantastically long pause between the women greeting her and her finally turning and saying, “Good Morning” that totally gets the point across. But the men don’t get anything and the women seem to get off easy. I realize why said smack down can’t come from Malèna, but I wish there would have been a way for it to have come from Nino or Renato.
Rating: 5/5 jars of peanut butter with perhaps just a spoonful out of one of those jars. I loved it, but I don’t see myself watching it again any time soon.
