Guiseppe Tornatore
Italy
2000
The film is not really not about a woman, it is about a 12 year old boy, Renato who couldn’t stop thinking about the town’s most beautiful woman--Malena. From the first time he set his eyes on their Latin language professor’s daughter, Renato, with his newly bought bicycle follows her distantly, from the steps of her door, to the streets, to the plaza, to the most secret places she goes, and even to her most private moments at their house. From then on, Malena has always been in the fantasy of the teenage boy. You will have a lot of flashbacks to the director’s earlier films and Vittorio de Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” and “Shoe Shine”
Directed by Guiseppe Tornatore, the film is promising as it is succulent with the sweet and nostalgic concepts, themes, and subject matters the director has long employed in his early films such as Cinema Paradiso in 1989. Looking at the charm of childhood, and the excitement of transitioning from a playing child to a masturbating teenager, and the provocation of adult’s irrevocable restrictions to them, it is unthinkable not to create a magical film out of it especially when the form is decorated by a lot of funny and naïve adventures. However, Tornatore doesn’t know how to sharpen his film. It has always been my problem with him even with his award winning “Cinema Paradiso”. He tends to triple the sugar into an already sweet thought, he saturates it, until its thick, and kill his audience with the overindulgence of his childhood films. Tornatore is a master of elements, in an unfortunate way, he includes large doze of elements that irritates the power of his works. They are just so all over the place that you wouldn’t know what to focus on, especially on “Cinema Paradiso”. And in a span of a decade, He hasn’t really improved much, though there is a negligible amount I must say, the coherence of the form of his films is still generally chaotic.
Narrative-wise, it is still also chaotic. You wouldn’t see much scenes about Malena and his father together. The death of her husband could have been the most appropriate time to see the father and daughter relationship. However it has been nayed and we have again missed a huge chance to know more about this woman. Perhaps the basic treatment for Malena’s character is the restriction of her self from the audience, it is understandable since the point of view is with the 12 year old boy who only knew her from a distant. But it shouldn’t be pushed to far, we should still know Malena by creating appropriate scenes to be captured by the subjective eyes of Renato. The part from where her husband died, to the dentist’s controversy, to the suddenly ended love affair with Lieutenant Cadei, the trial and her father’s death is actually the most consistent part in the film for we can thread all this pieces of the puzzle and realize that this is the reason why she has become a prostitute.
Comic treatment has always been at the film, and this confuses me about Italian culture. I need to know why judgment about prostitute is so intense that it even resulted to the town’s women beating up Malena. Narrative-wise it has not been enough to project what those women are accusing her that she is stealing their husbands, and that she is a disgusting human being, and that she deserves to kicked, slapped, and hit by brooms or of something I didn’t get to identify because of the fast editing at that part. Second, she is not the only prostitute in their place, though she may be the most beautiful. Finally, I conclude that this grand, thrilling, and repelling scene where they beat Malena is an inappropriate, disgusting scene pretending to be a brilliant one. The scene itself, without looking into the rest of the entire film, is not even a staggering one. The editing could have been kept calm and embark the minimal editing instead of the usual upbeat transitions for the beating scene. This is the most disappointing scene delivery from a supposedly astounding potential I have ever seen. First and foremost because the motivations for this scene are almost non-existent, and all you could ever ask is why? Second, it didn’t help the film and made it a pretentious film.
The film is also a woman’s nightmare. Aside from being objectified in the entirety of the film by any kind of man, it shows the unfortunate doom of a woman when she loses her husband, or a father, or any man. On the positive side there are two good things about it: one, is that Malena’s beauty has been consistently compared to a goddess as exemplified by the exposure of her breast, and second, there is hope in the point of view of a young man, in Renato’s eyes. Though the latter is a little bit wishful because the film really didn’t show any sign of change that a new patriarch would deal with. I am actually baffled why Renato doesn’t look like he is learning about a woman’s subordination to men, it’s as if the only thing he knows is that he wants to have Malena, that’s all. He has her in her black and white dreams touching and kissing her. Now that alarms me even more if there is really a development in Renato’s character more than just learning how to masturbate and piss in a woman’s hand bag.
I find the editing a little too flaunty, and just like the director, shows extravagance in their fields and sacrifice its real meaning and contribution to their film. One example I have already mentioned above. There are also some scenes where the film has lapses with the eye level. Cinematography may be better by miles compared to other filmic aspects. The pureness of the Italian sun compliments much the delightful childhood of Renato, and the camera has really captured that pureness. The music has been minimized in “Malena”. You can barely notice music accompanying big scenes. The only exception perhaps would be Josh Groban’s “You’re Still You” on the part where Malena leaves the town and Renato contemplates on a mountain rock overlooking the waters of the sea.
I can’t fully despise the film. I am a fan of these childhood-pinning, nostalgic stories about how much we long for some events that happened in our past. However, the film needs a lot of sharpening in the script, in the treatment, in over-all direction. Therefore I can say that the film is a disappointment. Too bad for the Italians, it has been a long time since a great film came from their nation. Tornatore’s creativity may be grander than De Sica and Fellini, but his films are not even half of De Sica or Fellini’s few mediocre films.
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