Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.
Calumny is a little breeze, a gentle zephyr, which insensibly, subtly, lightly and sweetly, commences to whisper. Softly softly, here and there, sottovoce, sibilant, it goes gliding, it goes rambling. Into the ears of the people, it penetrates slyly and the heads and the brains it stuns and it swells. From the mouth re-emerging the noise grows crescendo, gathers force little by little, runs its course from place to place, seems the thunder of the tempest which from the depths of the forest comes whistling, muttering, freezing everyone in horror. Finally with crack and crash, it spreads afield, its force redoubled, and produces an explosion like the outburst of a cannon, an earthquake, a whirlwind, a general uproar, which makes the air resound. And the poor slandered wretch, vilified, trampled down, sunk beneath the public lash, by good fortune, falls to death.
An aria entitled Calumny is a little breeze from Gioacchino Rossini: The Barber of Seville, Libretto by Cesare Sterbini.
Calumny means “slander” or “malicious gossip.” That is, as much as anything, what Guiseppe Tornatore’s marvelous film, Maléna is all about. Rossini’s The Barber of Seville is one of the most famous Italian operas and most likely Tornatore, as a cultured Italian, is familiar with the magnificent aria that’s text is quoted above. Maléna effectively gives substance, specifics and visual representation to the generality expressed in the Rossini aria.
The Story: The story of Maléna was based on fact, from the wartime experiences of writer Luciano Vincenzoni. It has the ring of truth. The film begins in 1940. It is the era of Il Duce’s fascism, when storm clouds loomed over Italy. The setting is a picturesque (though fictional) Italian town named Castelcuta, in Sicily (where many of Tornatore’s films have their setting). The focal character of the story is Renato Amoroso (Giuseppe Sulfaro), who is living out the charmed days of his boyhood. Renato is age 12½, hormonally active and this is his coming-of-age story. It is told from Renato’s perspective. We see only what he sees. On one particularly momentous day in Renato’s life, Mussolini declares war and Renato gets a new bike. Renato is still young enough that the latter is more immediately important to his life than the former. His biggest concern, at his age, is embarrassment about being the last boy in his class still wearing short pants (which, in Italy, only boys wear, not men).
Renato’s new bike earns him admittance into the local fraternity of girl-watching teen boys. Their principal target is the magnificent Maléna Scordia (Monica Bellucci), a 28 year-old seamstress and daughter of their Latin teacher, Professor Bonsignore. Maléna is not merely beautiful – she is stunningly beautiful. She seems to be the kind of woman created for the sole purpose of triggering sexual awakening in young men and blatant lust in adult men. Maléna is the most beautiful creature in all of Castelcuta. She has long shapely legs, beautiful long black hair, perfect body proportions top and bottom, and dresses well in thigh length tight skirts. She turns the heads of every man in town as she walks by, but also sets wagging the tongues of every woman. The wives deeply resent every bit of attention directed Maléna’s way and, consequently, she is subjected to constant slander and muttered resentments.
All of the teen boys are infatuated with Maléna, but Renato becomes downright obsessed. Though Maléna is married, her husband is missing in action on the war front. To Renato, Maléna represents the ideal of womanhood and an unattainable object of lust. Maléna exhibits no awareness of Renata or, for that matter, any of the men or boys who continuously ogle her. She cannot afford to because any acknowledgement would multiply the attention. Renato’s fixation if not requited in any way. He fantasizes about her when he masturbates and imagines himself with her in various classic movie scenarios, such as his self as a cowboy coming to her rescue or he as Tarzan and Maléna as Jane. These clips in his imagination are both humorous and poignant. He spends many after-school hours observing Maléna from a distance and even spies on her through a knothole in a shutter on a window of her home. By his close observation of her life, he comes to understand how little the town gossip matches the reality. She is being treated maliciously by the town and he is determined to be her protector. When news arrives that her husband has been declared dead, he sees her mournfully dancing around her apartment in her black nightgown with a portrait of her husband.
The death of her husband, which should have occasioned support for her from the community, simply intensifies the fear and hatred on the part of the women. Maléna is more dangerous to them without a husband than with, even if it was an absent husband. When Maléna’s pension is cut off, the women foreclose every opportunity for work for her and offer no help. The men of the town view her husband’s death as opportunity to make their moves. Several of the men try to take advantage of her, including some of the slimiest ones. Two men get in a fight over her outside her door, despite any lack of encouragement for either from Maléna . She is accused by the women of trying to seduce the men of the town and suffers the indignity of a trial. Although she gets off, by the theatrical antics and histrionics of her lawyer (the main comic relief in the film), she later has to sleep with him to pay her legal expenses. Thus, the accusation has created the reality. When the Germans occupy the town, Maléna has been reduced to such abject poverty that she is forced finally to resort to prostitution. She dyes her hair red and, later, blonde and becomes a “companion” for German officers stationed in the town. The women, of course, view these developments as confirmation that they had been right about her all along.
SKIP THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH TO AVOID SPOILERS
When the town is liberated by the allies, Maléna is subjected to the abuse typically dealt out to those who collaborated with the Germans. She is dragged from her hotel by the women of the town and beaten very nearly to death and her hair is shorn. The men stand and watch and do nothing to stop it. Finally, she is driven from the town in shame. Several months later, her husband returns – not dead after all – but can find no trace of his wife. None in town want to tell him anything about her except to pass on the false rumors. Renato, wanting to rectify injustice as best he can, leaves the husband an anonymous note with the truth – that Maléna had been faithful to him as long as she had believed him alive. The husband leaves town and searches for Maléna, ultimately reuniting with her. They return to Castelcuta and walk hand-in-hand, gallantly down the street, as if to announce to the townspeople, we have survived, unbowed, despite your malicious cruelty.
Themes: Four themes stand out for me in this intense film, the first being the one I alluded to in the opening of this review: slander. Renato is the only person in Castelcuta who knows the truth about Maléna and he knows that it bears little resemblance to the hateful lies of the townspeople. Maléna is about the meanness of small minds in a small town. Whether this propensity for malicious gossip is distinctive or more developed among Italian women or whether it’s universal, is something that each viewer will have to consider for themselves. Renato is so pained and disgusted by the malicious calumny that he observes that he even takes “revenge” on the saint that he had asked to protect Maléna.
The malicious treatment of Maléna could also be characterized as hatred of beauty. While that might seem like an absurd notion initially, the reality is that an unusually beautiful woman who incites lust in men (however unintentionally) often also incites hatred in women. The jealous women of Castelcuta imagined Maléna sleeping with every man in town or that she could any time she so chose (almost as bad to an envious mind). Extremes in any physical attribute, including beauty, can cause a person to be excluded and shunned. Consider, for example, this interesting quotation from Wilt Chamberlain, the former great 7' 2" basketball star about height: “I can remember one boy who lived down the street from me and was about the same age I was, telling me that his mother did not want him to play with me because I was too tall. I was about twelve years old. Can you believe that? I wasn’t too mean, I wasn’t the wrong color or a bad influence, I was just too tall.” Yes, we can believe it after watching a film like Maléna. Tornatore is to be respected for tackling a theme of this nature, since it is one that Hollywood consistently shuns. Several reviews that I read stated that Maléna was oblivious to the effect that she had on the boys and the men of the town. I don’t believe it. Having already introduced one sports analogy, I’ll suggest another. Every professional athlete who has ever been heckled by fans knows that if they indicate that they hear or are bothered by the heckling, it will redouble. Every attractive woman who has ever drawn wolf whistles passing a construction site, knows that any response to it will redouble the abuse. Maléna, in my opinion, was fully aware of her effect on men – how could she not be? She had simply mastered the necessity of ignoring it.
A third theme in Maléna is the issue of adolescent fixations. Every man and woman who ever fantasized over a period of time about a particular unattainable woman or man can identify with the reality of such obsessions. Renato’s fixation was so intense that he even picked a prostitute who resembled Maléna when his father took him for the ritual initiation into manhood.
A fourth theme in this film is the concept of becoming a man. I don’t mean to be sexist here; I’ll leave it to female readers to decide for themselves which aspects of this issue apply equally to the concept of becoming a woman. Renato became a man over the course of this film, but not so much because he reached a certain age, lost his virginity, or began wearing long pants instead of short ones. Such changes are only the superficial trappings of manhood. Renato became a real man through the changes that he went through in his psychology and understanding – changes that some males will never experience. Renato witnessed both the best of human nature (Maléna) and the worst (the townspeople who abused her). He learned about courage from Maléna and standing up to the cruelty of slander, conformity of public opinion, and insensitivity of abuse. He learned about mob mentality and the bullies that it produces (which could also be interpreted as a local manifestation of the same thinking that allowed Mussolini’s fascist bullies to thrive). Renato learned that Maléna was not simply an object of lust or a teflon-coated abstract ideal but a real and complete person susceptible to pain and suffering. It was through the wisdoms he acquired that he became a man in the only sense that really matters – mental and moral maturation. Maléna, the film, is not as much about Maléna, the woman, as it is about a boy who enters the story but exits four years later a man in the meaningful sense.
Production Values: Director Giuseppe Tornatore is best known for his popular film Cinema Paradiso (See my review at Cinema Paradiso.) Other fine films in his credits include Legend of 1900 and Star Maker (See my review at Star Maker.) Tornatore’s foremost gift is in addressing significant themes through stories of great intimacy. For Maléna, he gathered period memorabilia, vehicles, and furnishings to create an ambiance of wartime Italy.
Giuseppe Sulfaro, who played Renato, was discovered via an intensive talent search. He gives a very solid performance. Monica Bellucci’s job was not that taxing for most of the film. All she had to do was look like a sex goddess and she accomplishes that mainly with the physical assets with which she has been blessed. Nevertheless, she proves quite thoroughly that she can act when called upon to do so in the scene where she is pummeled and humiliated by the women of the town.
The score for this film was composed by the great Ennio Morricone, a famous film composer with more than 300 films to his credit. His work is sometimes inconsistent but brilliant at its best. The score for this film is certainly among the high quality ones and was justly nominated for an Academy Award for Best Score. The cinematography was the work of Lajos Koltai. It too was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Cinematography category. He provided many beautiful vistas, such as the limestone cliffs where the boys gathered for their daily girl-watching chores. Maléna was filmed in Syracuse, Sicily and in other Sicilian locales. The colors are extremely rich in this film.
Bottom-Line:Maléna is as stylish and profound as any of the great Italian film from past decades. The approximately eighteen reviews that I read while preparing to write this one varied widely in overall ratings, from as low as one star to as high as four or five (whichever was the most in the reviewer’s scale). It seemed to me that the reviewers who were less enamored with this film than am I didn’t respond to the principle theme – abuse by calumny – that the film portrays. Some found the coming-of-age aspect of the film less moving than in another great Italian film on the topic, Fellini’s Amarcord. I’d concede Amarcord the nod in sentimentally of the coming-of-age aspect of the story, but I experienced Maléna as significantly more profound overall, because of what it has to say about slander and abuse. My only significant criticism of this film is that I think it is marketed in a way that misled a lot of folks into expecting it to be one thing (a sentimental coming-of-age film) when, in fact, it deals with weightier issues for which such viewers are then emotionally unprepared.
The VHS version of Maléna is in Italian with English subtitles. The DVD is also in Italian, of course, but you can choose between English or French subtitles. The DVD also includes a 10 minute featurette on the making of the film, including interviews with Giuseppe Tornatore and Monica Belluci, as well as three TV spots, a theatrical trailer, and a Belluci photo gallery.
*************************************************************************************************
You might want to check out these other excellent films from Italy:
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.