An Introduction to MALENA
A world at war. A young man coming of age. And a woman who changed his life forever
Starring Monica Bellucci and Giuseppe Sulfaro. Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore. (R. 94 minutes. In Italian with English subtitles.)
'Time has passed and I have loved many women ... And as they've held me close, and asked if I will remember them .... I've said yes, I will remember you. But the only one I've never forgotten is the one who never asked, Malena."
In Sicily, Malena was every man's dream. She was attractive and she seemed easy. Unfortunately, she was already married. One day, a word about her husband's disappearance spreads and the male populace is given hope. Now Romano, the adolescent man who has desired Malena for the longest time can freely express his ardor to the beautiful lady. But he does not seem to have the courage to express himself. Will he continue to dream, like he has done in the past or will he garner enough strength to realize the dream?
Malena is a moving fable about the powers of the imagination and the perils of growing up. Another achingly poignant remembrance of childhood's most magical and transforming moments, this time Tornatore takes on adolescence - and the brushes with beauty, sexuality, revenge, the madness of war and the hunger for romance that open a child's eyes to an understanding of love and responsibility.
Malena is the most ravishing and irresistible beauty in Castelcuto, a sleepy village on the sunny Sicilian shore. She's new in town and with her husband away at war, every stroll she takes through town turns into a spectacle, accompanied by the lustful looks of the townsmen and the resentful gossip of their envious wives. An army of skinny teens on bicycles follows her everywhere just to stare at her exquisite, archetypal beauty. But among those boys is Renato Amoroso, an imaginative 13-year old who takes his desire to unexpected heights of obsessive fantasy.
Fueled by his dreams of cinematic romance, Renato Amoroso becomes Malena's secret shadow, a spy of love following closely her every sensuous move. The smallest moments in her life are perceived with a boy's highly charged eroticism. Even as his parents comically attempt to thwart his "sinful," "unhealthy" behavior - boarding up his windows, taking him to a priest, then an exorcist, then a prostitute - Renato maintains his vigilant, voyeuristic watch over Malena. He watches as her fortunes take a dark turn, as Malena becomes a young widow, and then becomes the dangerous object of the town's pent-up lust, jealousy and anger - the very eye of an emotional, erotic storm that sweeps across Castelcuto.
But as Malena is dragged down, disowned by her father, thrust into court, cut off from a livelihood and left penniless, Renato is sadly exposed to the social impact of provincial life. When all seems lost, he finds the courage to act, to take responsibility, and in doing so, to help Malena in the most unexpected of ways.
And one year later, Renato is once again watching from afar, as Malena, in typical Sicilian tradition, returns to Castelcuto to try and restore her dignity and honor in the town where it was lost.
Like his Academy Award-winning Cinema Paradiso (Nuovo cinema Paradiso), Giuseppe Tornatore's new film, Malèna, dwells in a nostalgia for the past, and for the coming-of-age of a single young male protagonist. Additionally, both films are set against the backdrop of the end of World War II, and focus on the young hero's maturation and subsequent loss of innocence. Though the war occupies a more prominent thematic position in Malèna, Tornatore's suggestion in both films is clear — there is no innocence possible, individually or culturally, after Mussolini, fascism, and the Holocaust. Indeed. As Theodor Adorno declared years ago, "Poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
Cinema Paradiso's major failure is that, while it raises the specter of post-war social and cultural transformations in Italy, it is content to wallow self-indulgently in its protagonist's sexual failures and naïve desire to escape his past. Malèna allows no such flight. Here the past is not dead or inert, it always influences the future; unlike Cinema Paradiso, this film recognizes the futility of its own nostalgia. Furthermore, the rather treacly love story — between Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro) and the war
widow Malèna (Monica Bellucci) isn't "merely" commentary on a boy's sexual awakening and his first impossible/unrequited passion. Renato and Malèna represent traditional Italian social and gender relations, as well as the political and cultural effects of Il Duce's dictatorship. The success of Malèna lies in how both Renato and Malèna's bodies and stories become national bodies and national stories, and in its negotiation of a delusional nostalgia for an Edenic, pre-Mussolini Italy in a post-Auschwitz world.
The film takes place in the small Sicilian village of Castelcuto around 1941, and we follow 12-year-old Renato's obsession with Malèna. She is left alone, with only her aged father for family, when her new husband Nino (Gaetano Aronico) goes off to war. As Renato's fascination with Malèna grows, we watch him engage in a series of rather predictable youthful shenanigans (which are nonetheless entertaining), including stealing a pair of her panties from the laundry line, masturbating incessantly, and causing his conservative Catholic family much consternation. Recalling Tornatore's previous work, Renato's masturbatorial fantasies cast him and Malèna in the roles of classic Hollywood romances — Tarzan and Malèna, Cowboy Renato saves Malèna from savage Indians, and Gladiator Renato proves his worth to the Empress Malèna. In these images come the first suggestion that nostalgia is untenable: while these cinematic romances point out the unattainability of any relationship between Renato and Malèna, they also belie the realities of the decidedly non-idyllic relationships Renato observes around him. In the end, Renato cannot save Malèna from any of the tragedies that befall her.
Isolated and beautiful, Malèna soon becomes the object of every male's sexual fantasy and the scorn of every local woman, all of whom seemingly exist only to spread rumors about Malèna's sexual habits. Each time she walks through the piazza, Malèna is met with lecherous stares and catcalls from the men, and stony glares and hand-covered whispers by the women. After she receives word of her husband's death and her father is killed during an Allied bombing of Sicily, Malèna finds that she, literally, has nowhere to turn. With no one to protect her virtue, Malèna is a target for sexual predations. After the smitten dentist Cusimano (Pippo Providenti) is caught lurking around her house, much to his wife's outrage, Malèna must prove in court that she is not guilty of "indecent behavior," or face two years in prison. This ham-handed commentary on the place of women in traditional Catholic Sicilian society (it's a virgin/whore thing, you know) is one of the film's major shortcomings. The second is that while Renato comes out of the war and his obsession without a scratch, Malèna is repeatedly exploited and abused; as usual, the miseries of the world are seemingly best "understood" (by whom, I wonder) through the debasement of women.
Also victimized by a local merchant who offers her rationed sugar, coffee, and other foodstuffs in exchange for sexual favors, Malèna soon sees that prostitution is the only avenue to ensure her own survival, and she actually becomes the "whore" about whom all the tongues have been wagging. What the film never really attends to, despite the lengths taken to show how "chaste" Malèna is contrary to village gossip, is how she so easily comes to this decision. But this is also where Malèna is transformed into political allegory, which is perhaps the only reason for her expeditious transformation. Malèna prostitutes herself not to the local men who so desire her, but to the German officers who occupy the town, just as, the film is suggesting, Il Duce prostituted Italy to Hitler's Germany. Now that Malèna's body and story have become the stuff of national symbolics, her fate at the hands of Castelcuto's women after the war is anything but surprising. Once Mussolini is overthrown and the U.S. army liberates Sicily — in a particularly gruesome scene — these women drag Malèna into the piazza, where they beat her, shave her head, and banish her.
In the aftermath of the war, the integrity of the nation must be reasserted, and this is effected on the local, Castelcuto level by abjecting the compromised body of Malèna. That is, her body and her life are a past that must be forgotten/gotten rid of. The film continues to demonstrate how the villagers attempt to rewrite history — as well as their own roles in that history — and how local knowledges are thus transformed into official knowledges. We overhear a local businessman talking about Malèna's whereabouts, and he muses that she is probably a "Commie" and has gone to the Soviet Union. According to this logic, Italy's cozying up to Nazism can only be forgotten by focusing on a new enemy, and behaving as if the "Commies" are and always have been the antithesis of everything Italy stands for. This man, of course, was also the leader of the local fascist cadre during the war, a role he quickly repudiates when asked if his new party line doesn't contradict his previous political role in the village.
For all the townsfolk's various attempts to erase or forget their own roles in the war, in the end Malèna returns to Castelcuto and becomes a constant physical reminder of the past, its continuity, and presence in today. Malèna's presence repeatedly challenges the nostalgia for an "innocent" past that infuses the population of post-war Castelcuto. The past is never simply past; this is the "lesson" that Renato learns. And while Malèna at first seems to be about one boy's sexual awakening, on a much broader level, it is about his — and Italy's and "our" — coming into historical consciousness, our awakening to the vicissitudes and legacies of the past and how they influence bodies and histories, both individual and national.
