Malena (Monica Belluci) finds herself the center of nothing but unwanted attention from her fellow Sicilian villagers in Malena.

Comparable events happened all over Europe when Hitler’s storm troopers retreated before the Allied onslaught. As lands were liberated, collaborators were pulled from their houses and aggressively confronted by those against whom they had sided. People were verbally harassed, beaten, shorn of their hair, stripped naked and hounded into exile, if not killed. Because we rightly regard the temporary Nazi hegemony as evil incarnate, we have taken little notice of and mustered less concern for those who endured the wrath of the betrayed. One reaps what one sows. At the heart of writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore’s magnificent Malena, then, lies a gesture of astonishing humanity. He dares wonder who the betrayer might be and why one might cast his lot with the enemy. Tornatore’s purpose is hardly to defend or even excuse perfidy, but to acknowledge that seemingly indefensible acts may sometimes be committed by defensible, even sympathetic people.

  The narrative in which this bracing theme emerges is set in the Sicilian city of Castlecuto, and it is developed, beguilingly, as a coming-of-age tale. Renato Amoroso (Giuseppe Sulfaro) has just turned 13 in 1940 when Mussolini announces his partnership in Hitler’s war against England, France and Russia. Because the people of Sicily have been dominated sequentially by the Mafia, Fascists and Nazis, we tend to think of them as victims. Tornatore sees the sundry ways in which his countrymen abetted those who have ruled them, and he notes at the film’s beginning that the advent of what will prove a disastrous war is widely greeted with enthusiasm. Renato’s family, though, is not among them. And from the outset, however much Renato craves acceptance by his peers, he is a boy who stands apart, who sees the world in a different way.

  When we meet him, shorter and skinnier than his friends, Renato is still a boy in short pants. Only when his father buys him a bike will the other boys in his neighborhood grant him admission into their gang. Once included, Renato discovers that his fellows are devoted to spying on the town beauty, Malena Scordia (Monica Bellucci), the voluptuous, raven-haired, 27-year-old daughter of the high school’s Latin teacher. Malena is the wife of a soldier already in Ethiopia and soon to be thrown into the fierce desert campaign in North Africa. Renato’s friends hang out across the street from Malena’s house and follow her like a swarm of insects when she walks to town to shop or bank. They concoct lewd tales about what each would like to do to Malena. One of the boys even boasts of having been lasciviously solicited by her. But whereas the other boys think of Malena only in terms of their own coarse lust, Renato, no less sexually excited by her, nonetheless regards Malena as an object of devotion. To Renato she is an emblem of purity, of ethereal beauty. The other boys ravish her in their imaginations; Renato idealizes her and becomes her unknown champion. Together, the stories of Malena and Renato become the story of Sicily itself.

  Though Malena is ultimately a sober film, Tornatore molds the beginning for bawdy comedy and in so doing recalls Federico Fellini’s Amarcord. In both films, the teenage boys are obsessed with masturbation. Here, Renato oils the creaky springs of his bed to better conceal his nightly raptures of onanism. Heaven is a night spent with a shamelessly filched pair of Malena’s lacy black panties spread across his face. Other comic passages, though, belong to Malena uniquely. My favorite is a sequence in which Renato tries to procure sanctuary for Malena by repeatedly praying to a saint and lighting a candle before the saint’s statue. When his prayers go unanswered, he attacks the statue as savagely as he might a human traitor. In its cinematic style, however, and in Ennio Morricone’s superb score, Malena will recall Tornatore’s 1988 masterpiece, Cinema Paradiso. Renato’s imagination and habit of thinking of himself as a movie character summon memories of Toto, the dreamy, romantic and idealistic young Sicilian movie projectionist who grows up to be a major Italian filmmaker. Malena does not follow Renato into adulthood, but his uncommon capacity for empathy leaves us with expectations that he will largely acquit himself well as he grows older.

  Unfortunately for Malena, the adults of Castlecuto have more in common with Renato’s friends than with Renato himself. The men in town leer at her and make crude comments about her barely out of her hearing. When Malena’s husband is reported dead at the front, men line up to console her, only to move their lips against her widow’s veil with the indecency of crude proposition. The women treat her even worse, gossiping about her without remorse, exaggerating into a vicious campaign of calumny, baseless tales of impropriety that begin as mean conjecture and metamorphose into cruel lies. She is almost saintly in response. She not only refuses to answer those who attack her; she barely acknowledges their existence. But this just fuels the frenzy of their hatred for her. As the war progresses, and the entire town is seized in the grip of hardship and deprivation, Malena becomes an almost conscious scapegoat. The townspeople even manage to turn her own father against her, and when they do, her circumstances quickly become desperate. She tries to take in sewing to sustain herself, but no one will give her work. Even when she has money, the women in the market refuse to sell her food. A madman claims to be her lover, and she is accused in court of being an adulterer. The lawyer who defends her extracts payment for his services by raping her.

Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro) is obsessed with a woman who is scorned by the townspeople in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena.

  Eventually, to survive, devoid of alternatives, Malena becomes what all her neighbors claim her to be. The scene in which she makes her decision is instructive. She cuts her long dark hair and dyes it first red and later blond. She takes on the outward guise of the slut; she becomes someone other than herself. And then she takes refuge with the enemy, offering her company and charms to the German officers who have occupied the town and treat the inhabitants with sneering disdain. The Germans are nominally allies of the dictator the townspeople saluted and cheered such a short time ago. But when Malena takes the arm of a German officer, she is not just a whore but a traitor. And the populace seethes with hopes for an opportunity to exact retribution. The liberation that arrives with the American advance provides the townspeople the freedom to punish Malena for having so long been their victim.

  Early in Malena, Tornatore establishes a metaphor that informs much of what follows. The other boys in Renato’s gang discover an ant, trap it and then employ a magnifying glass to cook it alive. This is precisely how the townspeople of Castlecuto behave toward Malena. They magnify the incidental details of her life into crude distortion. When she comes to town to visit her father, to cook and clean for him, they presume she’s arrived to meet some unidentified lover. After the news of her husband’s death, when she entertains the chaste attentions of another soldier about to be sent off to war, the townspeople judge her guilty of conducting a tempestuous affair. The tormented ant does not survive to sting one of the boys, but if it had, they would have seen the ant’s attack as justifying their cruelty. For the townspeople see Malena’s taking sanctuary with the Germans as proof of all the lies they’ve told about her.

  Thus, in its surface attitude about the Sicilian populace, Malena is Cinema Paradiso’s diametric opposite. In the earlier film, to fully embrace his identity, Toto must ultimately return home. The people from Toto’s town have their limitations, but only their vision is restricted, not their heart. In contrast, the small-town Sicilians of Malena are shockingly devoid of compassion, and we can only imagine that Renato must leave someday if he is to realize his fullest potential. As depicted here, the people of Castlecuto learn their lessons slowly if at all. The Fascist leadership slips out of its black uniform and into civilian garb without changing its vicious nature.

  Critically, though, Tornatore is wisely reluctant to let his heroes break the tethers to the soil of their rearing. A victim of class and even ethnic prejudice as a youth, Toto fails to find enduring love among the prosperous Romans and other northern Italians with whom he works. Renato, we learn in a voice-over, will suffer the same fate. The end of Malena smacks of an uncomfortable macho posturing tinged with a haunting melancholy. And this is entirely deliberate, making us ache for Renato in two ways at once: that life hasn’t satisfied him more and that in ways, inevitable perhaps, it has diminished him. Renato is left yet to discover what Toto learns at the end and what Malena herself seems always to know: Talent or great beauty may make you seem to stand apart, but you are different only in dimension, not in kind.

  The film states explicitly that dignity can only be found where it has been lost. But that phrasing seems to me slightly askew. Looking at the example of Malena, I would state the proposition this way: Dignity can be affirmed or denied, but affirmation does not bring it into being and denial cannot destroy it. You must go home again, spiritually if not physically, not because of the heart that some homes may not have, but because, like DNA strands in your genetic code, you are tied with unseverable bonds to the place from whence you arose.