The primary object of his affection – and that of every other breathing male in the town of Castelcuto – is Malena Scordia (Monica Bellucci), the new Latin teacher’s stunning daughter, who is married to a soldier away at war. Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro) is twelve-and-a-half years old in 1940, and his hormones are beginning to run amuck.
THE MALENA MOVIE MOVIE
Burnished with a golden nostalgic haze that suggests a third generation Amarcord (as filtered through Woody Allen’s Radio Days), the movie is a featherweight that might well blow right off the screen were it not anchored in place by a few darker undercurrents. In Italian with English subtitles.Sleeveless, scoop neckline shell in satin fabric with back invisible zipper – rust, gold or oliveĪ coming-of-age story from the director of Cinema Paradiso, Malena is set in a Sicilian seaside village that would seem downright idyllic were it not for the looming shadow of Mussolini and occasional Allied air raids. Violence, a mob beating and a central focus on adolescent male sexual "Malena" (R, 94 minutes) Contains obscenity, nudity, masturbation, family And that'sĮxactly what's wrong with "Malena": She's Renato's and Tornatore's sex fantasy, never a flesh-and-blood woman.
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It prevents him from playing with himself to reveries of her. Throughout Malena's rapidĭownward spiral, Renato alone remains faithful, with an adoration that is never so pure If you missed that leap of logic, so did I. When her soldier husband (Gaetano Aronica) dies in the war and she begins dating again, she's quickly ostracized, leading naturally enough to her becoming an actual prostitute. Look like Anne Ramsey in "Throw Momma From the Train"), the citizens revile Just because she's hot-looking (not a major accomplishment in a place where most of the women How Tornatore manipulates our sympathies is by making Malena the object of scorn in the town. Victrola (Renato, you see, spends an inordinate amount of time peeping outside her window), but other than her obviously bodacious assets, there's not much there there. Hero, we get to ogle her falling out of her slip as she bends over the What makes the claim dubious is that we never get to see exactly what Human being, or so the film would have us believe.
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Malena he begins to feel a deeper and more sympathetic concern for her as a They sit comparing notes about their genitalia). Okay, to be fair, Renato starts off little better than the older kids whoĭrool as Malena sashays about the sleepy seaside town (on the beach of which Swishing down the street, that's his heart, not some other organ swelling That's right, and I suppose we're meant to believe that when theĬamera zooms in for a close-up of his crotch as he gawks at this dish Oversexed, that is, except for little Renato Amoroso (Giuseppe Sulfaro), a 12-year-old who purportedly feels something more akin to love for Is little more than a cipher onto whom a gaggle of oversexed teenage boys (I know, redundant) project their lust.
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Played by the extremely fetching Monica Bellucci, the title character here I'm sorry, but even though filmmaker Giuseppe ("Cinema Paradiso") Tornatore's name is on "Malena," a wannabe sensitive coming-of-age tale set in World War II-era Sicily, it still feels more like "Porky's" with marinara sauce than "Summer of '42."