(Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy 2000, 92 min., Italian/subtitles)

A 12-year-old boy during the Italian fascist period develops a crush on the village outcast, a mistreated war widow (Monica Bellucci) who’s become the victim of cruel gossip. Another piece of bittersweet nostalgia from the director of Cinema Paradiso, Malèna is highlighted by an Oscar®-nominated Morricone score.

Program Notes

Malèna is based on a story by Luciano Vincenzoni, who is best known for co-writing the screenplays for some of the most savored Sergio Leone films, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and A Fistful of Dynamite, also known as Duck, You Sucker (all of which also happen to have Morricone scores). According to director Tornatore, he read the story of Malèna around 1990 and just put it in the back of his mind. In the mid-90’s, he met the ravishing Monica Bellucci while making a perfume commercial, and she reminded him of the story. At that time Bellucci was already famous in Italy, but she was known principally as a model; however, she impressed Tornatore as interested in serious dramatic acting. After about another five years, he wrote the part with Bellucci in mind and made the film. For the other leading role, that of the 15-year old boy Renato, Tornatore initially gathered some 3,000 Sicilian boys, eventually narrowed it down to nine, and then picked Giuseppe Sulfaro after full-blown screen tests. Sulfaro was a complete novice, with no acting experience.

Morricone has described his rapport with Tornatore as even greater than what he shared with Sergio Leone, who apparently could be somewhat stiff in his communications. As is Morricone’s habit, he composed most of the themes for Malèna in advance of filming based on his ruminations about the story, and then scored them for the final image. Morricone achieved the restrained melancholy of the Malèna character’s theme through the sheer economy of using of only three pitches. As is also Morricone’s custom, he provided all the orchestrations of his work for the film. And, as always, through his music the composer is clearly at least as much in charge of the audience’s emotions as the director.

Malèna was co-produced by an Italian company, Medusa Film, and by Miramax Films, with Miramax’s head at the time, Harvey Weinstein, taking a full producer credit. As such, the film is part of the extended story of Miramax’s major role in creating greater access for American audiences to not only what are broadly called independent films, but also to contemporary foreign cinema. It had in fact been Weinstein who had picked up for distribution the floundering Cinema Paradiso, reportedly unwanted by anyone else at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. A shortened version of Tornatore’s eventually much beloved film did tie for the Grand Jury Prize at that festival, but previous to that, the film’s nearly three-hour original version had been a stone plummeting toward commercial oblivion in Italy. There are conflicting accounts of whether it was a brutal Weinstein who imposed the deep cuts on an agonized Tornatore, or his Italian producer, or the harsh economic facts themselves, but in any case, Miramax soared with a svelte two-hour American release out of the art houses, across suburban multi-plex screens, all the way to the Oscar stage and the 1990 statuette for Best Foreign Language Film.

Whatever the exact truth of the shortening of Cinema Paradiso, by the time of Malèna ten years later, Miramax’s exertion of final artistic control by cutting films was known far and wide, and had earned Weinstein the redoubtable moniker of “Harvey Scissorhands.” In the case of Malèna, Miramax was involved from the production stage onward, and distribution in both Italy and the United States was planned from the start. However, Tornatore’s finished film included 17 minutes of the under-aged Renato’s explicit sexual fantasies regarding Malèna. Miramax, at times a seeming champion of strong film content, but at this point owned by the conservative Disney Studios, did not consider this material suitable for American distribution—and to be fair to Miramax, perhaps no other mainstream American distributor would have touched it either. The longer version of the film still remains, for all practical public exhibition purposes, unavailable in the U.S. (and mind you, in Turkey the film is another eight minutes shorter). This time a seasoned Tornatore asserted publicly that he made the cuts himself, and otherwise acknowledged that there are cultural differences between countries. He also made somewhat oblique allusions to his own willingness to compromise with statements such as “I say it’s worth it, because your thought, your idea stays,” followed by a laughing “What can you do?” Not all parties have waxed as philosophic as Tornatore about Miramax’s practices under Weinstein; if you are interested in a witty, but withering, narration of the company’s history through 2002, try Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures.

This film is most frequently identified as being about an adolescent first love, and the Sicilian Tornatore, who started out as a wedding photographer, is often identified as an unabashedly sentimental filmmaker. Nevertheless, the story is perhaps most powerful as a tale about some pretty unsentimental adult feelings and the corrosive capacity of negative expectations.

~Alexandra Terziev, Volunteer, Motion Picture Department

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