Malèna

Giuseppe Tornatore set the standard for mawkishly sentimental, beautifully-filmed, faux-brow foreign flicks back in '89 with Cinema Paradiso. Yet Malèna, which on one level is a cautionary about how malicious small-town gossip can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, is far darker and funnier than the comparable Chocolat - Sicily's hypocritical little ladies in black clearly have a much nastier bite than their Provencale equivalents.

The mix of bathos pathos here is ultimately rather a jarring one, as exaggerations delivered for comic effect in the first half are then used to form the basis of a near tragic turn of events in the second.

Yet this is an enjoyable and fairly moving film that could be acquitted from accusations of narrative delinquency simply by recalling that the drama has been construed by the nostalgic imagination of its chief protagonist, at the time an impressionable young boy coming-of-age in the fictional town of Castelcuta.

However, such a significant slip from orthodox realism is less easy to make absolutely clear in the third person perspective of cinema, and Tornatore's success in this respect is at best only partial.

It is Guiseppe Sulfaro, the newcomer playing the crush-afflicted Renato, who makes this film. Monica Belluci's character is more of an impression in the boy's mind than a fully three dimensional role. My favourite scenes are probably those involving Renato's contract negotiations with the statue of a saint in the local church.