Movie Review of
“Malèna”
rom a
tale of feminine triumph in 1920s Chicago we turn now
to a tale of feminine tragedy in 1940s Sicily, set against
the backdrop of World War II. “Malèna” (2000) is the story of a beautiful
young woman, Malèna Scordia, whose husband is
off at the front. Alone, without the protection of her
husband or her father (who is present but is a deaf and
doddering old fool), she is an easy target for the
brutal lust fantasies of the men of her village and the
envious spite of the women. Everyone assumes she is a
slut, but, in fact, she loves her husband dearly,
misses him bitterly, and is virtuous and faithful in
his absence. Malèna’s only sin is her
extraordinary beauty and radiant sexuality. As played
by Monica Bellucci, Malèna isn’t trying to
be sexy any more than the sun is trying to be hot.
It’s just the way she is. Sex radiates from her.
Life radiates from her. If there were any real men
around her, this energy would be reflected back towards
her as pure passionate love. She should be worshiped.
Instead, she is reviled.
The race of
Italians (or Sicilians, at least) does not come off
well in this film. The men
are coarse and brutal towards
this innocent woman, but one can read between the lines
to see that these are secondary reactions. The most
basic emotion Malèna awakens in these men is
stark, quivering fear. They are, to a man, terrified of
her, terrified of her sexuality, and terrified of women
in general, starting with their mothers and ending with
their wives (with a little time off now and then for
bullying around some prostitute). Behind all of their
formulaic bravado, they are simple cowards: pathetic
worms who evidently believe that frantic gestures and
loud hysterical speech patterns will make them appear
to be big bad serpents (phallic symbolism intended).
The women, if
anything, are worse. They are inflamed by
Malèna’s superior beauty into a frenzy of
spiteful hatred, which they stoke and caress with
slanderous gossip. This simmering, pustulant envy
finally bursts out in a climactic scene that is so ugly
it is hard to watch.
Malèna, thus
encircled by wolves and hyenas, is gradually weakened
and wounded and brought down. Her husband, Nino, is
reported as killed in action. An anonymous poison pen
letter turns her father against her. Her one honorable
suitor (now that she’s a widow), turns tail at
the first sign of trouble. She is brought to court on a
baseless charge of immorality. Her pension is cut. She
is shunned by all, even to the point of going hungry
because tradesmen will not sell food to her.
In the background
we see the progress of the war, from Musolini’s
grandiose declaration against the Allies; to the quick
retreat of the Italians from Africa; to their
humiliation as the Germans move in to do some real
soldiering; to their fawning over the conquering
Americans. Their capacity for making war, like their
capacity for making love, has all the depth of
cappuccino foam.
Malèna is
finally driven to the extremity which the villagers had
for so long fantasized about her: prostitution, first
for the locals, then for the occupying Germans. When
the Americans arrive (that is to say, when it is safe),
the women of the village drag Malèna from the
brothel and beat her in the village square while the
men look on helplessly. The women cap their orgy of
self-righteous indignation with the shearing of her
hair, then drive her out of town on a train.
The
“haircutting” of certain women was, in
fact, a ritual repeated throughout Europe as the
Americans came through, a ritualistic punishment of
those women who had slept with the Germans, for money
or favors or even for survival. To collaborate with the
enemy was shameful enough, but to sleep with them was
considered the ultimate shame, which needed to be made
visible for all to see.
But it’s
obvious that the fury behind this humiliation of
Malèna has nothing to do with the war. It is
fueled by purely personal spite. They seize on her
wartime prostitution, to which she was driven by their
own brutality, as an excuse. Malèna’s
tormentors are simply women who can’t hold a
candle to her beauty or sex appeal and who cannot
tolerate that fact.
The Italian men in
this movie come off as hysterical and pathetic, the
women (excepting Malèna), as hysterical and
vicious. A postscript to the story tries to mend this
impression. A year later, after the end of the war,
Malèna’s husband, Nino, thought to be
dead, turns out to be alive, a classic anagnorisis
and peripateia (revelation and reversal). He has lost
an arm, is worn and haggard from malaria, but alive,
and he’s looking for his wife. No one has the
guts to tell him what has happened, what they did to
her when he wasn’t there. Finally, a 12-year old
boy writes him a semi-anonymous letter, filling him in
on some of the details, including the destination of
the train she boarded.
He goes and finds
her and brings her back. He is still haggard looking.
So is she. The villagers are chastened by her courage
in returning (and perhaps by the presence now of her
husband) and they go out of their way to welcome her
back. She makes some signs of accepting the welcome.
The whole story is
told through the eyes of that 12-year-old boy, Renato
Amoroso. Alone of all the males in the village, he
seems to truly love her (from afar) and to look on with
pity as she descends into degradation. Clearly, we are
meant to sympathize with the boy, to admire his love,
and to pity his inability to express it.
I didn’t like
the kid and I never bought his PR. In this failure to
sell him, the movie founders badly. I simply never for
a moment found the boy sympathetic or admirable or
pitiable. He struck me, in truth, as more worried about
his own suffering than hers. The story, as far as
he’s concerned, has him as the hero, a tragically
unrequited lover. He struck me, like all the men in the
village, as quintessentially voyeuristic. He watches
her with those suffering, pitying (or self-pitying)
puppy eyes and never does one thing or says one word to
help her. His feelings are there only to help himself
feel virtuous and superior to the bestiality of his
neighbors.
One advantage to
screening a movie alone in your living room is that you
can vocalize your reactions without bothering other
theater patrons. Half a dozen times during this movie I
yelled out at this character, “You pathetic worm!
Do something!”
Clearly, we are
meant to think, “Oh, but he was too young to do
anything or say anything.” The boy is too young
to be her lover, yes, but is that the only way they
could have interacted? Was there not a single gesture
or word he could have given her by way of showing her
some loyalty, some faith, some admiration, or even some
simple affection? He never came to her defense. True,
he retaliated sometimes against her detractors, but all
that did was assuage his own anger. It didn’t
help her. He never lifted a finger to help her, yet he
bathed himself in the fantasy that he was her knight,
bravely battling the whole village on her account.
I watched this
movie thinking it would be one of those heart-warming
coming-of-age stories in which a wise and generous
older woman initiates a nervous boy into the mysteries
of sexual love, ushers him past that genuinely
terrifying threshold between boyhood and manhood. Only
if you have never been a boy, or have forgotten what is
was like, can you doubt the genuineness of that terror
and the truth that only a woman can make you a man.
Needless to say, this is not that kind of movie. If you
want to see that other kind of story, go see
“Closely Watched Trains” (1966), also set
in wartime Europe.
“Malèna” evidently thinks of itself
as a bittersweet tale of wisdom painfully acquired and
reconciliation dearly paid for, but I found the wisdom
and reconciliation about as real as the plaster saints
in the village church.
n last month’s issue, I
praised “Master and Commander” for getting
across the sense of the great depth of “genuine
feeling and civic formality” which characterized
the sailors of HMS Surprise, depths which I suggested
few contemporary men and women have explored. Later,
while I was idling in a local coffee shop in Beacon,
the Chthonic Café, flipping through the pages of
another literary review, I happened across a passage
about Yeats that expressed this idea more articulately.
I quote it here:
“Yeats
belonged to the last age in which manners meant more
than surface gestures. They indicated dignity, a
respect for order and tradition, and of people and
things outside the self. That the disruption of such
traditionalism gained increasing force during his
lifetime [1865-1939] only made Yeats a fiercer
proponent of it.” – Haskell, Dennis,
“W.B. Yeats”, Kenyon Review, Spring 2001,
p. 169
