Malèna (2000) - Bellucci radiant in Tornatore's under-appreciated ode

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Monica Belucci's head-turning beauty adores the poster for Giuseppe Tornatore's Malèna

In a small Sicilian town in 1940, as Italy enters WWII, a teenage boy is seeing the locally famed beauty Maléna, who changes his life.

Malèna is written and directed by Italian master filmmaker Giuseppe Tornatore (The Professor/Il Camorrista (1986)), based on a story by Luciano Vincenzoni (Little Funny Guy/L'Emigrante (1973)). It is Tornatore's 7th feature.
It is a wonderful little film of first love, the rampant horniness of the teenage boy, and the passing from boy into something else. It is also about a woman but mostly as an idolized, more or less mystical, older figure.
Monica Bellucci (She Hate Me (2004)) is incredibly beautiful and erotic as the title character, among the fairest and sexiest women in the history of cinema with Malèna one of the great bullets to prove this, and you can easily watch the film for her scenes alone and enjoy it immensely. But Malèna is also exceptionally shot (cinematographer Lajos Koltai (The Legend of 1900/La Leggenda del Pianista sull'Oceano (1998))), - and the score is pure Ennio Morricone (Porca Vacca (1982)) magic.

Related post:

Giuseppe Tornatore: Cinema Paradiso/Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988) - Tornatore's timeless masterpiece

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: Reportedly "around" 10 mil. $
Box office: 14.4 mil. $
= Big flop (returned 1.44 times its cost)
[Malèna premiered 26 October (Italy) and runs 109 minutes/92 min. in the North-American watered down edition. Shooting took place in Morocco and in Sicily, Italy from September 1999 - March 2000. The film opened #37 to a 62k $ first weekend in 32 theaters in North America, where it peaked at #28 and in 117 theaters, grossing 3.4 mil. $ (23.6 % of the total gross). The international gross sheet at Box Office Mojo is not complete, missing among many other markets Italy itself, likely the film's biggest or at least 2nd biggest market, but the 14.4 mil. $ gross is likely accurate. The film was nominated for 2 Oscars: It lost Best Cinematography to Pater Pau for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Score to Dun Tan for the same film. It was also nominated for 2 Golden Globes, a BAFTA, won 1/4 David di Donatello nominations, a National Board of Review award and several other honors. Roger Ebert gave the film a 2/4 star review, translating to 3 notches under this one. Tornatore returned with The Unknown Woman/La Sconosciuta (2006). Bellucci returned in Dear Father (2001, short) and theatrically in Brotherhood of the Wolf/Le Pacte des Loups (2001). Malèna is rotten at 54 % with a 5.58/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Malèna?