Given the promise, "Malena" is a disappointment. Renato's father (Luciano Federico) is meant to offer comic relief, but comes across as a charmless, bullying moron. But Tornatore's characters are stereotypical and grotesque. Tornatore is also attempting to echo the early post-war neo-realist movement, and there is even a verbal reference to Vittorio De Sica, one of its greatest exponents. His "Amarcord", for example, is a marvellous evocation of a Rimini childhood. Renato, having followed her progress through his adolescence, watches her humiliation passively.įellini would have done this more incisively. After the arrival of the Nazis she consorts with a German officer, behaviour that shocks the townsfolk, and later she is brutally punished by the women who beat her, shave her to the scalp, and strip her in public.
She is a war wife, and her husband is posted missing. One of the boys, Renato (Giuseppe Solfaro) becomes so besotted that he takes to spying on her, peering through her windows, and using her as a masturbatory object. In the early days of the fighting, the youth of a small coastal town make a habit of foregathering on the seafront to watch the daily promenade of Malena ( Monica Belluci) a young woman of ravishing beauty who strolls past totally ignoring them. The Second World War: Italy begins on the side of the Germans and later switches to the Allies, leading to seriously ambivalent attitudes. Giuseppe Tornatore's film, like his magnificentĬinema Paradiso", is set in Sicily, and recalls a past time within living memory of older people.
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