Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Starring: Monica Bellucci, Giuseppe Sulfaro

Rating: 2

In a Sicilian seaside town in 1940, as Il Duce’s voice declares the march to war on the radio, a group of adolescent boys have discovered something so perfect it has no place in their town — the luscious Maléna (Monica Bellucci), whose sultry sway provides perfect masturbation material for the men, young and old, who observe her. While most of the boys use their imaginations of Maléna for their own nefarious purposes, our narrator Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro) sees her as more than a sexual object, and his growing obsession with her, or his dream of her, provides the backdrop for a coming of age story, not just for a boy but for a town, and a country.

Maléna’s husband has been called up to fight Mussolini’s war, and is presumed dead in an African operation. As vicious gossip puts her in the beds of half the men, married or otherwise, in the town, she must eventually abandon her job and turn to sex to pay the bills, much to the horror of the onlooking Renato. Fraternising with German soldiers and taking up residence in the bordello, Maléna becomes a figure of ridicule and shame in the town, in the eyes of all but our young hero.

Maléna is the opening film of Perth’s inaugural Italian Film Festival, which will bring several acclaimed contemporary films to the screens of Cinema Paradiso over the next fortnight, allowing us a rare opportunity to experience the broader output of one of the world’s greatest filmmaking countries. The festival will close on November 6 with Gabriele Muccino’s anticipated ‘L’Ultimo Bacio’, an Italian box-office smash and winner of six David di Donatello awards.
Director Giuseppe Tornatore (eCinema Paradiso’) presumably intended to make ‘Maléna’ a story about coming of age, and about pride and redemption. What he has made, with the backing of the Miramax machine which turns all foreign films it touches into superficial eye-candy, is a saccharine-sweet Hallmark card of a film, obsessed with surface values and never reaching the deeper meanings it seems to be shooting for.

Tornatore’s camera loves the shape of Bellucci’s body, and the shape of the beautiful Sicilian buildings, but we get to know neither as much as we should. Bellucci saunters through the story looking sad, wistful, sexy, sad and then happy, as though she were a supermodel trying out facial expressions in the mirror. To her credit, this is all that the film demands of her. Tornatore’s point is that the young Renato has not fallen in love with a woman, but with an idea of perfection. Unfortunately, Renato’s perspective limits us to never finding anything beyond this idea, and fractured moments of meaning which connect into a fine picture book, but nothing approximating a real story.

When the women of the town turn against Maléna in the square as the American soldiers roll in to liberate Sicily, we are meant to be shocked by the brutality to which she is subjected. But Maléna has done nothing to deserve punishment of this proportion — it seems Tornatore just needed to follow a story arc that would finish with a Hollywood chestnut: eand ultimately, redemption’.

In ‘Cinema Paradiso’, Tornatore captured the confusion and magic of childhood almost perfectly, creating one of the finest Italian films to have crossed into the Hollywood market since the days of Fellini. But Maléna follows the Academy Award-baiting formula of Miramax’s foreign language films, masking lack of substance with beautiful production values, stunning cinematography and a sweeping score — just the things American audiences want from a foreign film. The words don’t matter; you would have to read those from the bottom of the screen.

Maléna’s score is particularly fine, coming from the pen of the legendary Ennio Morricone. His Oscar-nominated music works tirelessly to develop emotions in a story which has little of substance, masking the shortcomings of the film in a way only a master screen composer can.

In the end, however, a fine score does not a good film make, and Tornatore’s lightweight take on the old, old subject of adolescent sexual obsessions is a waste of talent, and of a great performance from the young Sulfaro. Tornatore has always shown a desire to be a modern day Fellini, and the nostalgic tone herein evokes nothing more strongly than that great master. But this is no ‘8 1/2’, it is faux-art of the most sugary kind — all surface, no feeling.