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Susan Granger's review of "MALENA" (Miramax Films)
From Giuseppe Tornatore ("Cinema Paradiso"), this coming-of-age W.W.II allegory is told from the perspective of a 13 year-old Sicilian boy who is sexually obsessed with Malena, the local beauty played by Monica Bellucci. Set in the seaside town of Castelcuto, the story begins as Mussolini rallies his countrymen. While Il Duce's voice drones from every radio, the mind of young Giuseppe Sulfaro concentrates only on fantasies of love and lust for this young woman whose husband is off fighting. As the war escalates, so does the town's disdain of Malena's voluptuous appeal. First, she's rumored to be a hussy, the town tart. Then, after her beloved husband is reported killed in North Africa, she's censured for brazenly consorting with German soldiers, resulting in a spiteful, brutal beating by an angry mob of women. Malena's beauty becomes her curse. Throughout it all, Giuseppe watches her with dark, soulful eyes from afar - either atop his bicycle or perched in a tree outside her small villa. Based on a story by Luciano Vincenzoni, Tornatore's screenplay switches abruptly and annoyingly from broad comedy to stark tragedy, and his direction often echoes Fellini's "Amarcord," laced with a frustrating overdose of sentimentality and Ennio Morricone's over-blown score. But Bellucci and Sulfaro deliver appealing, if wooden, performances, and fans of Tornatore's ability to evoke an enchanted atmosphere of intimate, melancholy nostalgia, within a grand scale of stucco, stone and local color, will find plenty of that. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Malena" is an idyllic, poignant, sensual 6 - in Italian with English subtitles. And, if you missed Tornatore's "Legend of 1900" (1999) about a piano virtuoso who lives his life on a luxury ocean liner, rent the video.
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