Grade: A-

Verdict: A stunning study of a woman whose beauty becomes a tragic destiny.

Details: Starring Monica Bellucci. Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore. Rated R for sex, nudity, profanity, violence and much sexual innuendo. In Italian with subtitles. One hour, 34 minutes.

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Review: We all know that Giuseppe Tornatore, writer/director of the Oscar-winning “Cinema Paradiso,” can toss off sun-drenched nostalgia with the best of them. He has a unique talent for evoking a simpler time of memories and movies.

So, at first, his marvelous new movie, “Malèna,” comes off as the Tornatore take on the sex fantasies of the early Fellini. The title character is a woman of heart-stopping beauty and unsullied female otherness, with the face of Isabelle Adjani and the body of Sophia Loren.

But as it turns out, Tornatore is after something quite different. Something quite unlike Fellini's surreal human carnivals. Something tragic and complicated.

It's 1940. Mussolini has just thrown Italy into World War II. And Malèna (Monica Bellucci), a young newlywed, has just moved to her husband's tiny village in provencial Sicily. A newcomer, she has no friends. A gorgeous newcomer, she immediately evokes every man's desire and every woman's envy. The situation is compounded when her husband goes off to Africa to fight for Il Duce.

Her daily solitary stroll into the town square usually causes a mini-riot. The teenage boys whoop and leer. The men stare and lust, returning to the local barbershop to exchange lewd jokes. The women stare and smolder, muttering vengeful oaths under their breath.

The only one who truly sees Malèna is 13-year-old Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro) who worships her from afar and appoints himself her guardian angel. Tornatore fetishises Malèna mercilessly. She's introduced as a series of body parts: the hair, the legs, the thighs, the cleavage. Initially, this is deeply disturbing. The director seems no better than the crude villagers. Then you slowly realize that this is exactly what Tornatore intends. We're not supposed to see the story through Malèna's eyes, to understand her inner life. Tornatore wants us to see her as the townspeople see her — from the outside, without any sense of her as a human being.

In a way, the movie is less about Malèna than it is about a kind of nasty, dim-witted mob mentality. These simple earthy peasants — who cheer as loudly for the American liberators as they did for Mussolini — are capable of simply appalling atrocities.

The broadly comic scenes function in much the same way. Again, it's unsettling to see vaudevillian vulgarity injected into Malèna's story. Again, this is what Tornatore wants. He shows us that, as far as the men are concerned, Malèna's troubled life/deadly downward spiral is about as serious as a sex romp.

The stunning photography — Allied bombers fly over the town like a swarm of vampire bats — and the sunny locations contribute to the film's ploy of misdirection. Underneath the those-darn-Italians trappings, is a microcosm of post-war Europe (or, if you like, post-segregation America). People who behaved abominably pretend that whatever they did never happened. The victims must decide whether to swallow their rage and participate in the re-written history or to remain a baleful icon of truth and accountability. “Malèna” is an extraordinary film. One that makes something wistful,enduring and even optimistic out of humanity's basest instincts.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution