Malena (2000)

Giuseppe Tornatore's Malena arrives like a bottle from a cellar nobody has opened since 2000: dust on the shoulder, a promising nose, and a finish that leaves the modern palate slightly confused. The film concerns a Sicilian town at the start of the Second World War, a boy on a bicycle, and Monica Bellucci crossing a piazza while the entire male population rearranges its afternoon. The camera adopts the boy's vantage point with no apology and no framing device to put distance between us and it. We are invited to look, and looking is the whole architecture of the picture.

The film observes. It does not sermonize. Its subject is beauty and the tax levied upon it. Gossip is a local industry here, and the town can agree to destroy a woman and then offer her free fruit once she is safely married and no longer a threat. That is serious material, handled with a certain velvet gloom, but the film never stops to instruct us in how to feel about it. No thesis is pinned to the wall. No character is drafted in to explain the moral. The women who beat Malena are simply shown doing it, and the camera, like the boy, does nothing.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the cellar is bare. The cast is uniformly Italian and uniformly white, by circumstance and by design. There is no economic critique, no environmental concern, no interest in neurodivergence, and the film's attitude toward its title character has been described by better-stocked critics as the precise opposite of empowerment. The Academy nominated it for cinematography and score, which are not categories that reward a lecture. A clean plate, then, and a faintly melancholy one: a well-photographed vintage from a season that has gone badly out of fashion.