# Malèna (2000)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    MALENA

Reviewed by Harvey Karten Miramax Films Director: Giuseppe Tornatore Writer: Giuseppe Tornatore, story by Luciano Vincenzoni Cast: Monica Bellucci, Giuseppe, Sulfaro, Luciano Federico, Matilde Piana, Pietro Notarianni

This one's addressed to the men...when you were in high school, did you have fantasies about women who were about your own age, in your own class for example, or did you fancy women who were a decade or so older than you? We're told that nowadays teens consider anyone more than ten years older than they are to be over the hill, not worth considering as real people. Stereotype this may be: But another convention is that European men actually prefer women to be considerably older, or at least they do not consider age a barrier to a good relationship. This may have been particularly true before the sixties, and indeed if you watch Giuseppe Tornatore's new movie "Malena," which he adapted for the screen from Luciano Vincenzoni's story, you get the impression that the young Sicilian guys of the early 1940s in one particular medium-sized town drooled exclusively over the 27-year-old Malena Scordia (Monica Bellucci). Maybe one or two teen-aged women make appearances in the film, just briefly, but for Tornatore's purposes there is only desirable female in the entire municipality.

Soaking his movie in the obligatory brown hue which is the way warm climes situated in the past are photographed, Tornatore uses Renato Amoroso (Giuseppe Sulfaro) as his spokesman. Renato is a lad lucky enough to own a bike during a critical time that just about everything was in short supply. He joins a gang--which in those days meant not a group that indulged in pot or coke or crime or basketball, but whose raison d'etre was dribbling over one particularly comely individual. Malena, daughter of the deaf Professor Bonsignore who is the teacher of the young men, is married to a man who is at the front and reported dead. Though Malena at first appears to be untouchable, gossip quickly spreads that she has been involved in several affairs--with the town's lawyer, its dentist, and ultimately the German officers who take up occupation in the town in 1943. When the war ends, the women of the town take near-biblical revenge on the object of their long-term envy, while young Renato feels helpless to protect her form the enraged and mostly homely lynch mob.

Tornatore's magnum opus was "Cinema Paradiso," about the love of a young boy for the movie theater in his small Italian town during the late forties--a warm tribute to the art of the film. "Malena" by contrast is an overly simple tale highlighting a woman who has so few lines that we know little of her motivations or her very character. Perhaps her silence, her seeming obliviousness to the stares she receives from literally everyone she passes on the cobblestoned Sicilian streets, gives her the aura of mystery that informs the boys' wet dreams. But with Renato's looking consistently soulful (in fact in downright psychic pain) throughout--unless he is actually being physically tormented by his cartoonish parents (Luciano Federico and Matilde Piana), we in the audience are simply starved for stimuli. Nor does the film's derivativeness help. Take another look at Robert Mulligan's "Summer of '42," the 1971 movie about a teen with a crush on a young war bride (played by Jennifer O'Neill) which also captures the flavor of the 1940s and possesses a delightful Michel Legrand score.

Rated R. Running time: 105 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com

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