If you enjoy sweet with sour, Malena is for you. But be warned, the combination is a little hard to take.
Written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, the film -- in Italian with English subtitles -- appears to be a straight-forward coming-of-age profile of an obsessive boy growing up in Sicily during WWII.
The focused compulsion of the boy (Giuseppe Sulfaro) centres on Malena, a shapely and seductive woman (Monica Bellucci) in his village. She's the object of desire by many more than the boy struggling with his sexual urges while on the verge of becoming a man.
Based on a Luciano Vincenzoni short story, the subject seems just about right for Tornatore, who won the hearts and minds of filmgoers, and Oscar voters, a decade ago with the delicately sentimental Cinema Paradiso. It won rave reviews, a decent box office and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film.
Malena is not delicate. Along with a romantic, sometimes comical story of a loyal 13-year-old kid, you get a brutal, sometimes uncomfortably unnerving depiction of Malena's fall from grace.
That happens when the town's folk turn on her for consorting with undesirable Nazis after she is widowed and desperately trying to survive. That sour, war-is-hell theme is an awkward middle, bookended by the boy's sweet coming-of-age tale in the confusion and commotion around him.
The two-movies-in-one thing is distracting and annoying, and ultimately frustrating.
Get by the unsettling contrasts, and there are things to appreciate.
Newcomer Sulfaro is commendable as the kid who discovers that fantasy and reality are never compatible. And then there is his over-reacting family, which is almost sitcom-like in their comic outlandishness.
The most vivid element of this exercise is Bellucci's restrained yet revealing performance as the woman punished for her beauty and her decision to exploit it in an immoral way.
Her portrayal is the solid centre of a fractured foundation.
Why fractured? It's a film that aspires to do two things at once, but ends up doing not much at all.
(This film is rated AA)
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