'Malena': sex, violence, and it's not good?

To understand the low level of emotional complexity behind Giuseppe Tornatore's new film Malena, a drama about a young Sicilian boy in love with an older woman, one needs only watch the first five minutes.

COURTESY MIRAMAX Whorin' ain't easy... remember 'Milk Money?'

The film's adolescent protagonist, Renato Amoroso (Giuseppe Sulfaro), rides his new bicycle down a dirt path on the edge of the small town of Castelcuto, eager to show his friends his new possession. Cut to a cramped and crowded street where all of the townsfolk are ordered to turn their radios to a broadcast from Mussolini, who has just declared war on France and England. Cut back to Renato, sitting on a seaside bench with a few of his school pals, watching as local bombshell Malena Scordia (Monica Bellucci) struts down the dirt road towards town, her white blouse billowing in the wind. Her milky skin glimmers under the Mediterranean sun; her perfectly sculpted legs exude sex with every high-heeled step they take. Young Renato, faced with such an impressive beauty at such an impressionable age, pops a woody through his shorts. We know this because Tornatore cuts to an extreme close-up of his crotch. It's the crescendo of the scene, overshadowing Mussolini's war declaration and the busy tapestry of small-town poverty that is Castelcuto. The heart of this movie, and the source of all its tension, lies in this boner.

Sound crude? Don't blame me. Torn-atore, in an effort to show the blossoming of young, unrequited love, never rises above the sticky, bestial nature of the whole affair. The film's title character is the most beautiful woman in the village, inspiring envy and scorn from the women ogling from the men. When news hits that Malena's husband was killed fighting in North Africa, a flurry of gossip erupts over who will bag Cast-elcuto's finest piece of ass. But the gossip turns vicious as unfounded rumors fly over Malena's sexual exploits, and the village's women soon dub her a whore. A social pariah, Malena must prostitute herself, eventually stooping so low as to sleep with officers of the occupying German army.

All the while, Renato is experiencing an intense sexual awakening, with Malena as the object of his desire. Yet Tornatore never moves the focal point of this desire north of the penis, leaving the audience to wonder what the point of this film is. There is never anything more than lust driving the dramatic tension, because no one involved—not the audience, nor Renato, nor the townspeople—is ever allowed inside Malena's head, to see beyond the beautiful face and curvaceous ass. The result is that the audience, robbed of a deeper understanding of the title character, takes on the role of unsatisfied and unsympathetic voyeur, viewing her descent into prostitution no differently than watching a shot of her breasts accidentally falling out of her dress: with visceral interest and emotional disconnect. Malena spends a good part of the film walking through the village square in silence, nothing more than moving eye candy and a subject of gossip. Renato, for his part, spends most of his screen time either undressing Malena with his eyes or jacking the one-eyed bishop under his bedcovers.

When Malena tries for sentimentality (which is often), it falls flat on its face. No relationship ever develops between Renato and Malena (they hardly speak a word to each other), and his longing, woeful stares in her direction get old quickly. By the time he involves himself in her life by performing a small act of heroism, the viewers have lost interest.

There's an anti-Fascist message in there somewhere, but it gets mostly buried by the banal love story that is supposed to be developing. It seems Tornatore is attempting to make a parallel between the villagers' collective and public damnation of Malena and the dangerous, mindless conformity that begets Fascism. Yet the cast of characters that populate Castelcuto is so one-dimensional and so insultingly stereotypical that any attempt to show the impact of a repressive political system on ordinary people becomes irrelevant. Every Sicilian man here is lust-crazed and irrational, every woman envious and scheming. Renato's father (Luciano Federico), prone to administering indiscriminate beatings to his whole family while screaming his head off, resembles Roberto Benigni sapped of joy and high on crack.

Tornatore's greatest transgression, and the one that ultimately damns this movie, comes towards the end, when Malena is dragged out of her brothel to be publicly beaten and stripped by a few of the townswomen. As Malena stumbles through the square in humiliation, we are supposed to feel pity. But the only thing Tornatore conditioned us to care about was her body, and that—bloody, bruised, and disgraced as it is—serves only to leave one with a sense of disgust far from the sympathy the filmmaker was trying to elicit. When the villagers call her a whore, one can do nothing but agree with them. And when Renato, in a touching end-of-movie voice-over, tells us that he will never forget Malena, we are left to wonder what all the fuss is about.

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