Stars and bars (3/2/01)
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Malèna. [Giuseppe Tornatore, 2000.]
A Sicilian
Summer of ’42: the wartime adolescence of Italian lad Giuseppe Sulfaro acquires focus when he develops a mostly-comical fixation on the eponymous Malèna [Monica Bellucci], the local combat widow, the lodestar of the community gossips, and certain proof we didn’t win the war against the Axis because we had Betty Grable on our side. Though much of this, predictably, is just
Porky’s with subtitles — squeaking bedsprings, hairy palms, the farting night watchman, the deaf Latin teacher, the pratfalls of the peeping Tom — there is a deeper humor in the comic particulars of Sulfaro’s struggle to liberate himself from the pernicious influences of the civil and spiritual authorities; and the fate of Malèna herself at the hands of the mob of moral simpletons who accomodatingly cheer both the Fascists marching off to war and the Americans marching back isn’t funny in the slightest. — Indeed, the moral lies here: in the suggestion that exhibiting the spiritual capacity to suffer the ritual stoning the mob demands of its martyrs with dignity — not so much turning the other cheek as finding the magnanimity to transcend any need to call the transgressors to account or seek revenge — ennobles not merely the victim herself [and her not-so-dead husband], but even the witless yokels who would tar and feather her and run her out of town on a rail; if you try to think of a contemporary figure the moral equivalent of Malèna, it might be John McCain.
Thus very funny and surprisingly deep, but mainly remarkable for the presence of the phenomenal Ms. Bellucci: who is, for the moment [Uma having taken extended maternity leave] the most beautiful babe on the silver screen. — And add another to the list of Anna Karina homages: this, Bellucci’s dance to an scratchy 78 in a darkened livingroom as her young admirer watches, fascinated, through a peephole — the object of desire and the director/voyeur within a single frame.
____________Six hundred thirty four blowjobs in five days (2/28/01)
