Ray Pride

Giuseppe Tornatore's "Malena" is a minor masterpiece on the tangled web of unrequited love.

The director of eight features (such as "Cinema Paradiso") mingles adolescent longing, idealization, transference, slapstick, a sweet Ennio Morricone score and endless glimpses of stranger-to-town Monica Belluci wandering down a small Italian village's streets and seashore promenades during World War II, a smitten young boy named Renato Amoroso (wonderfully convincing first-timer Giuseppe Sulfaro) inventing her in her wake.

Tornatore's lusciously mounted jack-in-the-box fable gets at the willed derangement of a particular sort of juvenile masculine thwarted longing in diverse ways. Imagine everyone talking after the pretty stranger has left the room, or town: we invent the habitations of our greater world according to our own self-reflective need. "There is a universal element in this film. It's happened to everybody," the 44-year-old director tells me in fast volleys between his translator and me. "To desire a woman, who, at the same time, is also the object of desire for others. To fall in love with a woman who's older when we are younger, and to every woman, it's happened at least once in their life, to notice in the look of a small boy, something strange! This was one of the reasons I really wanted to make this film."

Tornatore is certainly no poet of abstraction, but he's good at goonish lyricism -- a chorus of smacks, wanks, rumors, grudges, gliding camera, the lubricious canter of a woman's hips against waterside sea-dazzle. There are influences of Fellini and Visconti, but Tornatore is more buffo than serioso. I wondered if he ever feared making an elevated fable merely decorative? That the decors get in the way of the characters? "It's a very important question. With this film, I did not have this problem. This is a very big problem which I had in 'The Legend of 1900,' where the settings and the environment always influenced the actions of the characters. I had to shift some of their motivations so they would suit the environments. I agree that the ambiente and the settings must be well thought out from the point-of-view of the characters who have to breathe within them."

While the boy's adolescent urgency demolishes the lush sheen of the widescreen compositions, Tornatore told cinematographer Lajos Koltai he wanted a certain look. "The dominant color should be this stone found in Sicily, called tufo. Very porous, between yellow and gold." Like sandstone? "Sandstone! I told him I wanted that. When you say this to a director of photography, you know that you're telling him a special atmosphere, especially when I am not framing this stone in any shot! As a boy, the houses of the town I was from were all made of this. The color of my childhood is that color. It's a sensual color. This autobiographical reminiscence gave me the right psychological key."

While based on a short story, Tornatore has liberally added other stories, including his father's recounting of a public humiliation he witnessed much like that which cruelly happens to Malena. It becomes film as an extended oral history, many stories, many childhoods fused into one. "I like this sedimentation, Cinema Paradiso. There are things from my life that I transfigured in time. There was a period of my life when I would follow whatever woman that I liked at the time with my 500 Fiat. When I wrote the film, I realized that the bicycle would be very important because I know how useful my Fiat was to me to follow all the movements, to show yourself always showing yourself to the woman. She would walk, then she would see you, she's walking somewhere else five minutes later, she sees you again. We've all done it."

The cruelty of the mob is shown. Acceptance, if not forgiveness, is hopefully invoked. More than being an outsider, she is mystery itself. "That sounds like an affirmation, but I share it with you. Effectively, Malena remains, in the beginning and the end, a mysterious personage. You never know everything about her. You only know certain things, only the things that the little boy in succeeds in robbing and stealing from her life, mixed with what he imagines. You don't know anything about her! When you're infatuated with a woman that you have no relationship with? When it's over and you don't see her anymore, the things that stay with you about her, it's just a mass of hypotheses. You don't even know if she had existed for real! The film had to be told completely from the boy's perspective. If I had told the story objectively, I would have had to tell the story of the life of Malena, in a logical way, but Malena, every time that we see her? Something's happened to her, we don't know what or how. I really like this. She is always a mystery. She is, even until the final image. She walks away... her back to us... she remains a mystery. The mystery of a beautiful woman who nobody knows, she's walking away, towards her own existential fate."

"Malena" is now playing. (2001-01-04)

Also by Ray Pride

THE SEA OF EMOTIONS
To attain the sublime, sometimes you must tempt the ridiculous, a thought that may occur when you are watching a movie where Tom Hanks' best friend is a volleyball named Wilson.
(2000-12-21)

DON WAN
While director Nancy Meyers' dreadful movie may become a monstrous, monster hit, it is stupid, patronizing trash of a very low order, even considering her prior work on cinematic offal like "The Parent Trap" and "Baby Boom."
(2000-12-14)

SAME RIVER TWICE
Lessons in bearing: How do you carry yourself when film critics and scholars around the world concur that you are one of the handful of the greats?
(2000-12-07)

GREEK TO ME
Thessaloniki is not a premiere festival, like Sundance or Cannes, or a catch-all like Toronto, but ten days with one and a hundred pockets. Most of the films have played elsewhere, including Chicago's festival. But the combination of films and filmmakers are always a great treat.
(2000-11-30)

STILL LIFE
(2000-11-30)

GIMME PROVIDENCE
(2000-11-23)

THE MYSTERIES OF HISTORY
(2000-11-16)

SUSHIOLOGY 101
(2000-11-09)

ID STUFF
(2000-11-09)

INTIMATE LIGHTNING
(2000-11-02)

AMERICAN POP
(2000-11-02)

TICKLE ME DEADLY
(2000-10-19)

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